When NetApp started publishing about how their filers worked,  I saw it as a great demonstration of the power of computer science.<p>Their patents kept direct competitors away,  but the core ideas of the write-ahead filesystem had a big impact on an industry that was going ahead anyway and implementing these in kernels, userspace,  etc.<p>Then came the SSD and they had no brilliant IDE of how to make more of that...<p>Had they had a more mainstream platform they could have caught up with &quot;code moving&quot; instead of &quot;data moving&quot;? because you could run established software like Hadoop.  If your core OS is Linux,  Windows or something mainstream you can get all kinds of software but if you have to port it to something codesigned in 1993 you probablt won&#x27;t to do