Within the PowerShell community there has been a lingering debate over modules and providers. Initially everyone seemed compelled to do both. Personally, I’ve never been very impressed by third party providers. Mainly because they always felt like a gimmick. They forced the file system analog, and the results where not very good. They were buggy, slow, and didn’ t support the standard provider hooks. This lead to many vendors never bothering, and focused instead on cmdlets. I myself had come to the conclusion that providers where something for the PowerShell team, and third party ISV should just leave them alone. Fortunately the provider in version 1.3 of the DataONTAP PowerShell toolkit has broken the mold and renewed my faith in providers!
Read morePowerShell: NetApp DataONTAP Toolkit v1.3 A PSProvider done right!