When you stop and think about it, the storage systems we use are all made to a pretty simple formula. The SAN, the NAS, the disk backup and data deduplication hardware–from the lowliest desktop NAS to the enterprise Fibre Channel behemoths, they are all made from two ingredients.
The first key ingredient is the thing that actually effects data storage: the hard drive, of which there are relatively few variations that are almost completely interchangeable. The second key ingredient is the controlling software, the operating system. This is the bit that enables storage vendors to make billions of dollars and to lock customers into their product eco-systems.