NetApp is rejoicing the shipment of over 150,000 unified storage systems, and some analysts are driving the company, whose stock has increased by 5% in the last few days.

However, another view is that this press and blog blitz may have more to do with an expected unified storage declaration from the storage industry's 800-pound monster, EMC.

Rumors indicate that the introduction of EMC's V-CX line will take place sometime this month, joining elements of EMC's midrange CLARiiON and Celerra lines.

NetApp's Patrick Rogers, Vice-President of Products, Alliances and Solutions Marketing, says that unified storage is the wave of the future and the distinction between SAN and NAS is vanishing.

"If you look at IDC data, the prior categories of SAN and NAS are merging into FAS or fabric storage", he said.

Based on this information, a new company blog affirms that NetApp leads in offering more storage capacity per revenue identified than any other vendor for all tracked protocols.

NetApp made a debut in unified storage, with the FAS900 series, on Oct. 1, 2002, stepping beyond conventional file-serving abilities by serving up blocks over Fibre Channel.

The company had consumers and developers, using Unix, Linux and Windows workstations and they couldn't afford to have multiple structural designs. "That's where NetApp started to realize need for unified storage", he added.

Looking forward, Rogers says that storage virtualization and the skill to move data around, although difficult than server virtualization, will be crucial.