First of all, both NAS and SAN are software based products, sitting on hardware and OS platforms. NTAP's advantage lies in the total cost of ownership and price performance advantages provided by its open/proprietary ONTAP (w/WAFL) operating system platform. That OS platform sits atop commodity hardware. Though that hardware is commodity (to the board level), the selection, integration testing, and final assembly testing of that hardware and the NTAP software is controlled by NTAP and assures consistent quality, reliability and performance of the delivered unpack and play (unpack the boxes, plug them in) product(s).
No one is "coming on with hardware alone". There is some level of software/hardware packaging required by every storage vendor, unless they are a commodity provider like Seagate (disk drives) or BRCD (fc switches), or EMLX (fc-acl controllers).
However, some (i.e., SUNW) have taken their existing software and hardware products, pre-packaged them as NAS systems to be more or less "unpack and play", with little or no new software.
Hope that helps.
Jerry |
