Video Upload Options

In computer storage, a so called NetApp "filer" was referring to the storage systems product by NetApp, before block protocols were supported. It can serve storage over a network using file-based protocols such as NFS, SMB, FTP, TFTP, and HTTP. But the so-called "Filers" can also serve data over block-based protocol, such as the SCSI command protocol over the Fibre Channel Protocol on a Fibre Channel network, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), FC-NVMe or iSCSI transport layer. The product is also known as NetApp Fabric-Attached Storage (FAS) and NetApp All Flash FAS (AFF) NetApp Filers implement their physical storage in large disk arrays. While most large-storage filers are implemented with commodity computers with an operating system such as Microsoft Windows Server, VxWorks or tuned Linux, NetApp filers use highly customized hardware and the proprietary Data ONTAP operating system with WAFL file system, all originally designed by NetApp founders David Hitz and James Lau specifically for storage-serving purposes. Data ONTAP is NetApp's internal operating system, specially optimised for storage functions at high and low level. It boots from FreeBSD as a stand-alone kernel-space module and uses some functions of FreeBSD (command interpreter and drivers stack, for example). All filers have battery-backed non-volatile random access memory or NVDIMM, referred to as NVRAM or NVDIMM, which allows them to commit writes to stable storage more quickly than traditional systems with only volatile memory. Early filers connected to external disk enclosures via parallel SCSI, while modern models ((As of 2009 )) use fibre channel and SAS (Serial Attach SCSI) SCSI transport protocols. The disk enclosures (shelves) use fibre channel hard disk drives, as well as parallel ATA, serial ATA and Serial attached SCSI. Starting with AFF A800 NVRAM PCI card no longer used for NVLOGs, it was replaced with NVDIMM memory directly connected to memory bus. Implementers often organize two filers in a high-availability cluster with a private high-speed link, either Fibre Channel, InfiniBand, 10 Gigabit Ethernet, 40 Gigabit Ethernet or 100 Gigabit Ethernet. One can additionally group such clusters together under a single namespace when running in the "cluster mode" of the Data ONTAP 8 operating system.