The percentage of BSD "DNA" in OnTap, far exceeds the percentage of NetApp revenue donated to the BSDs.
1/100,000th of NetApp's 2004 revenue would just about cover the dollar amount requested by OpenBSD.
Does anyone at NetApp care to claim that that OnTap is less than 1/100,000th BSD?
I'm not saying NetApp "owes" anyone, they are fully within their rights per the BSD license. I am saying they would be smart to donate filers to all the BSDs. Think of the R&D ROI they could achieve. The good PR "points-per-dollar" would be higher than any marketing/advertising campaign.
The business case for such donations is clear. It's just sad that NetApp hasn't already donated for more honorable reasons.
Network Appliance a.k.a NetApp is noticeably absent from the OpenBSD donations page (www.openbsd.org/donations.html). Anyone who uses a NetApp knows immediately that the OnTap OS is BSD, always has been BSD.
Considering the Billions (yes, Billions) of dollars in revenue NetApp has derived from the BSDs, I am appalled at the company's lack of contribution back to the BSD community!
Considering that a good number of their founders, engineers, and developers were educated at Berkeley (yes the B in BSD), I am doubly appalled at the company's lack of contribution!
Now OpenBSD is looking for some storage and NetApp sits by while a POS Dell array is considered? You know, Dell, as in EMC's (NetApp's biggest competitor) biggest partner!
HELLO? NetApp? HELLO? You should make sure that all the BSDs host their CVS repositories on NetApp, a nice BSD based platform.
FWIW... Yes, I contribute. I have standing subscriptions and kick in a few extra bucks when needed.
Checkout www.falconstor.com They have a Linux/Solaris based storage virtualization product that would enable you to build fat but diskless clients. For Windows and Linux/Unix clients use a Fibre Channel or iSCSI card in the clients, and boot off a remote disk as if it were a locally attached SCSI drive. Linux/Unix clients can also be booted the old fashioned way (netboot, etherboot, etc) but why go through the trouble?
You get all the benefits of having local disks in the clients plus centralized backup and management like you get with thin clients. Example: Some user blew away his whole drive while playing with fdisk? At the central server just restore a recent backup, or copy over a standard disk image, and tell the user to reboot.
I've been using it for a while now and one cool feature is the ability to virtually swap boot "disks" for my machines where I used to physically swap boot disks mounted in removable carriers. I am also using it to share a single tape drive among 5 servers, using their SCSI over Ethernet implementation. It's almost like NAT sharing for SCSI devices.
Slashdot Mirror
The percentage of BSD "DNA" in OnTap, far exceeds the percentage of NetApp revenue donated to the BSDs.
1/100,000th of NetApp's 2004 revenue would just about cover the dollar amount requested by OpenBSD.
Does anyone at NetApp care to claim that that OnTap is less than 1/100,000th BSD?
I'm not saying NetApp "owes" anyone, they are fully within their rights per the BSD license. I am saying they would be smart to donate filers to all the BSDs. Think of the R&D ROI they could achieve. The good PR "points-per-dollar" would be higher than any marketing/advertising campaign.
The business case for such donations is clear. It's just sad that NetApp hasn't already donated for more honorable reasons.
Network Appliance a.k.a NetApp is noticeably absent from the OpenBSD donations page (www.openbsd.org/donations.html). Anyone who uses a NetApp knows immediately that the OnTap OS is BSD, always has been BSD.
Considering the Billions (yes, Billions) of dollars in revenue NetApp has derived from the BSDs, I am appalled at the company's lack of contribution back to the BSD community!
Considering that a good number of their founders, engineers, and developers were educated at Berkeley (yes the B in BSD), I am doubly appalled at the company's lack of contribution!
Now OpenBSD is looking for some storage and NetApp sits by while a POS Dell array is considered? You know, Dell, as in EMC's (NetApp's biggest competitor) biggest partner!
HELLO? NetApp? HELLO? You should make sure that all the BSDs host their CVS repositories on NetApp, a nice BSD based platform.
FWIW... Yes, I contribute. I have standing subscriptions and kick in a few extra bucks when needed.
Checkout www.falconstor.com
They have a Linux/Solaris based storage virtualization product that would enable you to build fat but diskless clients. For Windows and Linux/Unix clients use a Fibre Channel or iSCSI card in the clients, and boot off a remote disk as if it were a locally attached SCSI drive. Linux/Unix clients can also be booted the old fashioned way (netboot, etherboot, etc) but why go through the trouble?
You get all the benefits of having local disks in the clients plus centralized backup and management like you get with thin clients. Example: Some user blew away his whole drive while playing with fdisk? At the central server just restore a recent backup, or copy over a standard disk image, and tell the user to reboot.
I've been using it for a while now and one cool feature is the ability to virtually swap boot "disks" for my machines where I used to physically swap boot disks mounted in removable carriers. I am also using it to share a single tape drive among 5 servers, using their SCSI over Ethernet implementation. It's almost like NAT sharing for SCSI devices.