What types of goals did NetApp set for this new platform?
Howard: There were a number of dimensions. Of course we looked at raw performance, but we also focused on improving database workload performance with 64-bit addressability to support memory size greater than 4GB. NetApp has a unique advantage in its ability to provide true unified storage (that is, consolidating multiple types of storage and protocols on a single box: primary and nearline, CIFS and NFS, FC and iSCSI target mode, etc.), so we wanted to design in enough flexible I/O to allow customers to take advantage of that. We also decided to move to an embedded I/O to reduce cost. Naresh: The other key area of focus was high-performance computing, which stretches the limits of most systems. In the past we had a relatively small number of clients simultaneously accessing data on our systems. Now we see chip vendors and computer animation studios that have thousands of Linux® servers and they often want to concurrently read/write large amounts of data from/to a single system. This me
