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NetApp introduces new all-flash storage array designed to accelerate high performance for enterprise-class SAN applications

SPC-1 Result shows the new EF560 leads in price-performance for all-flash arrays with an average response time of under one millisecond.


Johannesburg, 28 Jan 2015

Today, NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) announced the NetApp EF560 all-flash array with improvements in storage performance to offer the absolute and consistent latency, bandwidth and IOPS critical to enterprise database and analytics applications. Based on a new Storage Performance Council SPC-1 Result, the all-flash EF560 achieved the leading SPC-1 price-performance for all-flash arrays with an average response time of under one millisecond, at $0.54/SPC-1 IOPS.

"New deployments of server platforms, CPUs, operating systems and enterprise applications are driving IT leaders to re-balance their data centre infrastructure, and storage performance is a key success factor with these upgrades," said George Kurian, executive vice-president of Product Operations at NetApp. "Our new high-performance all-flash EF560 is exactly what enterprises need to serve their customers faster and provide a better overall user experience."

Additionally, the company introduced the new NetApp E5600 hybrid array, which leverages the flash optimisations of the EF560 in hybrid configurations using both solid-state drives and conventional disk drives. The hybrid E5600 storage array delivers increased performance and reliability for more capacity-intensive SAN applications, including data warehousing, e-mail and backup.

According to Leah Schoeb, senior partner and analyst, Evaluator Group: "The flash-based storage market has shown incredible growth over the past year as the solutions available continue to evolve to meet the demands of today's enterprise applications. From high-frequency trading to real-time risk management, enterprises are seeing that flash storage performance can dramatically change their business."

NetApp EF560 all-flash array - Applications that control key business operations such as databases, analytics and OLTP require both absolute performance and consistent response times in order to speed customer response times, deliver actionable results more quickly, and reach decisions faster.

The NetApp EF560 maximises the value of flash to provide the top SPC-1 price-performance value for a storage array with an average response time of under one millisecond, reaching 245,011.76 SPC-1 IOPS with an average response time of 0.93 milliseconds in the SPC-1 Result. The new SPC-1 Result also confirmed that at 50% of the specified SPC-1 load level, the EF560 delivers an impressive 122 491.97 SPC-1 IOPS at an average response time of 0.34 milliseconds.

NetApp E5600 hybrid array - The E5600 is the newest hybrid entry in the E-Series family, offering a mix of flash and disk to provide cost-effective performance for more capacity-intensive applications such as e-mail, SharePoint, HPC, OLAP, data warehouse and video. The E5600 seamlessly scales to petabytes.

Both the all-flash EF560 and the hybrid E5600 are supported with the latest NetApp SANtricity 8.20 software. NetApp SANtricity 8.20 features multicore performance and online disk firmware upgrades. And, for database administrators, the all-flash EF560 and hybrid E5600 also offer integration with database management software, including Oracle Enterprise Manager, VMware vSphere, Microsoft Systems Center and Splunk. Additionally, NetApp OnCommand Insight storage management software provides operational best practices for capacity planning and storage utilisation. For private cloud deployments, NetApp provides OpenStack block storage (Cinder) drivers for the all-flash EF560 and hybrid E5600 arrays.

Availability
The EF560 and E5600 are available now. For more information on the all-flash EF560, visit here. For more information on the hybrid E5600, visit here.

Additional resources
Learn more about today's announcement on NetApp 360.
Read the EF560's SPC-1 Full Disclosure Report from the Storage Performance Council.
Learn more about NetApp's flash portfolio.
Follow NetApp on Twitter.

Supporting quotes

NetApp customers:

Steve Knipple, CTO & VP of Engineering, EasyStreet
"As a managed cloud provider, deploying and maintaining high performance environments is crucial to our enterprise clients who rely on mission-critical applications. They count on us to make the right technology choices that deliver on their specific needs and ensure 24x7x365 availability. The extreme performance from the EF-Series has enabled us to offer exactly the type of speed and reliability many of our clients require from us."

Dr Dieter Schr"oder, head of systems and operations, DWD
"As the primary agency that monitors meteorological conditions over Germany, Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD) is constantly processing large amounts of data, requiring a high level of reliability and performance. The NetApp E-Series not only met our need for 30GB per second of throughput, it also reduced energy consumption by 30% and reduced required space by 48%."

Bill Kernan, CIO, Western Oregon University
"For today's higher education institutions, constant connectivity, mobility, and access to rich media anytime, anywhere not only helps attract and retain the best students, faculty, and staff, it defines the learning experience. At Western Oregon University, our students can be a very demanding audience. The EF560 shows promise in delivering the extreme performance, consistent low latency and reliability required to power a media-rich learning environment."

Adrian Jansz, head of information communication & technology, RP Data
"Managing and providing access to vast amounts of data is difficult but also paramount to the success of our business as the leading provider of property analytics across Australia and New Zealand. After implementing the EF all-flash array, we've seen a 70% improvement in performance and throughput, giving us a significant competitive advantage."

Jean-Yves Nief, head of Storage Group, IN2P3 Computing Centre
"As an international expert in data processing for physics experiments, the IN2P3 Computing Centre (CNRS) must ensure a level of impeccable quality of service to its users. We were looking for a solution that can host our GPFS catalogue (General Parallel File System), which will soon reach a billion files accessed simultaneously by thousands of scientific applications. And this with an optimal response time to each query. The solution proposed by NetApp with the EF560 array met our performance criteria in reliability and scalability, and all within a constrained budget."

NetApp partners:

Jack Rondoni, VP, Storage Networking, Brocade
"To realise the increased performance and functionality delivered by the new all-flash NetApp EF560, organisations need to assess their storage network to make sure it is not a bottleneck. By partnering with NetApp to deliver Gen 5 storage area networking solutions as a foundation for the new array, our mutual customers can be assured their mission-critical application workloads will realise these improvements in availability, bandwidth and predictable low latency."

Mike Austin, director Global Strategic Partners, Cisco
"For over a decade, NetApp and Cisco have built a strategic partnership foundation. We look forward to continuing to build on this partnership to deliver FlexPod solutions that drive application performance."

Ralph Nimergood, VP of WW Channels and Alliances, CommVault
"Over the years, NetApp and CommVault have worked together to provide a comprehensive set of joint solutions across snapshot management, backup and archive, and the recent addition of an integrated backup appliance. Today's all-flash arrays announcement from NetApp will continue to provide improvements in the storage performances for our current and future customers."

Doug Matthews, VP Information Availability, Symantec
"As information explodes, and the need to properly manage it increases, enterprises are facing additional challenges around their IT infrastructure. Together, NetApp and Symantec are providing enterprises with a variety of solutions that cost-effectively maximise the potential of flash-based storage for information availability and performance. The combination of the new NetApp all-flash array and Symantec storage management solutions will help our customers meet current and future information challenges."

Bill Britts, senior VP, Quantum Sales and Marketing
"The strength of NetApp's storage portfolio has been a key factor in the expansion of our partnership. Together, our two companies will continue to provide customers with powerful workflow storage solutions based on E-Series and Quantum's StorNext 5 data management."

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NetApp

Leading organisations worldwide count on NetApp for software, systems and services to manage and store their data. Customers value NetApp's teamwork, expertise and passion for helping them succeed now and into the future. To learn more, visit http://www.netapp.com.

SPC

The Storage Performance Council (SPC) is a vendor-neutral standards body focused on the storage industry. The SPC created the first industry-standard performance benchmark targeted at the needs and concerns of the storage industry. From component-level evaluation to the measurement of complete distributed storage systems, SPC benchmarks will provide a rigorous, audited and reliable measure of performance.

For more information about the SPC and SPC-1, visit: http://www.storageperformance.org.

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