Balancing the data infrastructure realities of today with the growth promise of tomorrow, NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) today updated its FAS midrange storage systems with the introduction of the FAS3220 and FAS3250. The new systems deliver a superior mix of industry-leading performance, capacity scaling, and value to create an infrastructure foundation that accelerates business growth.
Designed for stringent SAN and NAS environments, the new FAS storage systems help enterprises and midsized businesses that are consolidating operations onto a shared storage platform improve performance by up to 80%, and increase storage capacity up to 100% over existing midrange products. Native support for high-speed, low-latency Flash and industry-leading non-disruptive operations provides organisations with the necessary foundation for an intelligent, immortal, and infinitely scalable agile data infrastructure.
"Most enterprises, despite uncertain economic conditions, continue to aggressively invest in technology leaders that can drive agility cost savings into their IT infrastructure," said Brendon Howe, vice-president, Product and Solutions Marketing, NetApp. "Our new unified midrange products are optimised for both mission-critical SAN and NAS environments, leverage technologies such as Flash and clustered Data ONTAP to address today's performance and capacity needs and non-stop operations, and are architected to scale for future needs."
Watch Brendon Howe discuss why the new FAS3200 series is an ideal building block for an agile data infrastructure.
With NetApp SAN solutions, organisations can double storage utilisation, cut storage spending in half, and boost productivity across the entire business, while enjoying high performance and availability. NetApp's award-winning FC SAN solutions show industry-leading performance for clustered storage. Customers using NetApp SAN technology experience storage efficiency through thin provisioning and data deduplication of up to 50% or greater.
Powerful, affordable midrange systems deliver enterprise scalability, efficiency
The FAS3200 series is a flexible platform that can be tailored for virtualised, private cloud or traditional environments, requiring only a few terabytes of storage to over 2PB in a single system. When clustered, an FAS infrastructure can scale performance and capacity across 24 storage nodes. This architecture provides significant performance and capacity scale, while delivering non-disruptive operations by enabling transparent upgrades, system replacements, and performance balancing.
Clustered Data ONTAP enhances industry-leading NetApp Data ONTAP storage operating system features by enabling high-availability storage platforms, such as FAS3220 and FAS3250, to operate as a shared pool of resources. This capability offers massive scalability and performance, simplified management, and the ability to transparently migrate application data. Data ONTAP is the number one storage operating system and - in a single, feature-rich data management platform - offers data protection, massive scalability, thin provisioning, deduplication, thin clones, Snapshot copies, backup, and disaster recovery.
To ease expansion and allow system customisation, the new systems include up to three times the number of PCIe expansion slots, which can be used to support network cards, Flash Cache cards, and additional storage connectivity.
As with all FAS systems, the FAS3220 and FAS3250 enable companies to reduce disk purchases by 50% through a superior set of storage efficiency features that apply to both primary and secondary storage.
Optimised system performance with Flash-enabled platforms
Both the FAS3220 and FAS3250 systems are designed to boost application responsiveness and performance by leveraging NetApp's powerful Flash technologies, all of which are designed to provide fully automated, virtual storage tiering. NetApp Flash Cache, which is a controller-based PCIe card, speeds data access through intelligent caching of recently read user data and metadata in the storage controller. No set-up or ongoing administration is needed, and by adding NetApp Flash Cache intelligent caching, IT administrators can optimise storage system performance, improve storage efficiency, and reduce costs with an increase in I/O throughput of up to 75% and use fewer disk drives without compromising performance.
NetApp Flash Pool is a software feature within Data ONTAP that enables automated storage tiering across combinations of solid state disks (SSDs) and traditional hard disk (HDD) based on traffic patterns, providing better performance under load without requiring users to migrate data in demand. The Flash Accel software product leverages Flash technology on the server to deliver I/O throughput gains of up to 80% and average response time improvements of up to 90%. With support for "hot" data access at the server, as well as Flash-based storage caching with Flash Cache and Flash Pool, organisations can meet service levels and gain storage efficiencies in excess of 60% by enabling the right storage media to be used at the right time for the right data.
IT infrastructure, through speed, capacity, and reliability, is turned into a competitive advantage. Combined with NetApp virtual storage tiering, Flash also improves storage efficiency by enabling reductions in power, cooling, and data centre space requirements.
Building block for partners to meet more customer requirements, drive long-term sales
The FAS3200 platform is designed for environments spanning traditional to cloud and enables partners to meet their customer-specific needs and foster long-term business sales. These systems address the needs of enterprises and midsize businesses alike, with the agility to respond to customer needs dynamically and without interruption. The FAS3220 and FAS3250 provide the predictability, connectivity, and scalability to meet the many needs of the customer and manage growth with an intelligent, simple, predictable, and scalable platform.
To help customers maximise the technology advantages of the new platforms and generate higher ROI by managing cash flow and utilising limited budgets more efficiently, NetApp is offering 0% financing for customers who are trading-up to the newly released FAS3200 systems. Promotional financing is made available to customers in countries and regions where NetApp Capital Solutions is available. Offer valid until 19 April 2013. To learn more about NetApp Capital Solutions or this offer, contact your local NetApp Sales Representative or a NetApp Authorised Partner for additional information.
Availability:
Both the FAS3220 and FAS3250 are available and orderable today. Both systems will be available through NetApp's worldwide network of value-added authorised resellers, distributors, and systems integrators.
Additional resources
* Read further about today's announcement: "The FAS3200 Series: The Perfect Balance of Price and Performance for Both Enterprise and Midsized Business Organizations"
* Learn about: "5 Steps to an Agile Data Infrastructure"
* Watch the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG)'s video: "NetApp Introduces FAS3200 Series"
* Follow NetApp on Twitter
* Connect with NetApp on LinkedIn
* View NetApp videos on YouTube
Share