Unlike DNF, OnTap 8 actually looks like it is going to ship! This has been a long road and it is unfair to say that at various points it looked like that the version number was actually denoting the years it had been in development. But that's what it felt like!
The release of OnTap 8 is interesting; it's a big deal for NetApp and is almost certainly as a big a deal for them as V-MAX was for EMC. But what is important is that it is not currently linked to any new hardware platform; it is a software release. Yes, there are some hardware announcements but no major refresh.
This is currently a hugely important difference between NetApp and many of it's rivals; NetApp are a software company which happen to sell a hardware platform to run their software on. Their hardware platform is not especially special (sorry guys but it isn't); the special sauce is the software. And with OnTap 8, they have completely revved the recipe!
The feature list is impressive and contains many things which I have wanted from them for some time. Lots of good stuff around scalability; some of it long overdue, especially the enhancements delivered by 64 bit goodness.
I especially like the announcement around Data Motion; seamless migration between storage devices, a big deal in the NAS space. Moving NAS data around without outages is painful. If NetApp achieve this, more power to their elbow. Data Mobility is one of those problems which has yet to be fully solved.
I am not entirely convinced by the PAM-II cards and it is going to be interesting to see how the competing approaches to flash stack up long term.
So we've had V-MAX from EMC and OnTap 8 from NetApp. So what have HDS and IBM left to offer us?