Subscribe

NetApp expands flash portfolio

Kirsten Doyle
By Kirsten Doyle, ITWeb contributor.
Johannesburg, 21 Feb 2013

NetApp says flash is the way forward, and the time has come to drop high-performance disks in favour of flash storage.

The company has unveiled the EF540 storage array that uses all-flash storage, and at the same time previewed the architecture of its new FlashRay product family, extending its comprehensive enterprise flash portfolio.

NetApp says the EF540 flash array and the forthcoming FlashRay family offer flexibility and choice and maximise the value of flash across the entire compute, network and storage stack.

The company says it has deployed more than 36PB of flash in the market to date.

According to Mike Styer, NetApp SA country manager, flash changes everything by transforming the speed of business.

However, enterprise imperatives for global scale, efficiency and reliability remain the same. NetApp's approach to flash removes the compromise from consideration, offering customers the best of all worlds.

According to the company, the EF540, built on the SANtricity operating system, is the industry's first flash array to combine consistent extreme performance with enterprise-class high availability, reliability, manageability and worldwide support.

It delivers over 300 000 IOPS and sub-millisecond data access in a highly available, fault-tolerant architecture. "It can eliminate storage over-provisioning and dramatically reduces costs by cutting space utilisation, power and cooling. Business-critical database applications can run up to 500% faster than in traditional storage environments, delivering instant response times and enterprise-class reliability."

Some of its features include intuitive storage management and advanced tuning functions, enabling efficient management with minimal effort. The storage system maximises application value and has a fully redundant architecture designed to eliminate downtime.

Styer says the FlashRay family is purpose-built all-flash storage architecture. The architecture is founded on scale-out and efficiency capabilities to maximise the benefits of flash arrays. "It will combine consistent, low-latency performance, high availability and integrated data protection with enterprise storage efficiency features, such as inline deduplication and compression."

FlashRay will be available in limited beta in the middle of 2013 and will be generally available in 2014. The NetApp EF540 flash array is available today.

Share