NetApp squeezes ONTAP into teeny weeny device

NetApp is working on running ONTAP, an operating system for storage arrays, on IOT edge devices and other small things

The game was given away by a tweet today from John Martin, NetApp’s APAC director of strategy and technology, and in a subsequent exchange with Simon Sharwood, the Oz journalist (and former Register APAC editor).

Here’s the tweet stream;

Our take? We think NetApp engineers have installed ONTAP on an Arm-class or RISC-V class CPU system. That means it could run on  devices with embedded ARM systems, such as smart NICs and assorted IoT edge devices. They could integrate with larger NetApp systems, on-premises or in the cloud or both.

Octavian Tanese, NetApp’s SVP for ONTAP, commented by Twitter;

We are seeing computational SSDs – from NGD, for example – and we think these could also run ONTAP on their embedded processors. Whether it would be useful to have a single drive ONTAP system is… another question. 

We have asked NetApp for comment and a spokesperson said: “We don’t have anything we’re announcing publicly at this time regarding this. It is not a solution that is officially in development, but should that change we will definitely have something for you.”