First Shipments of NetApp All-Flash Array FlashRay Systems Introduced Last Year

NetApp, Inc. announced its first shipments of FlashRay, the company’s purpose-built all-flash storage array with its new Mars OS FlashRay.

  NetApp in flash

It is designed to improve the performance, efficiency, and manageability of all-flash storage architectures used in enterprise application environments.

The new system combines the benefits of all-flash storage technology with patented and patent-pending technology to provide performance, storage efficiency, data protection, and data management. NetApp’s approach to flash storage helps customers achieve enterprise application performance at a lower cost.

FlashRay began shipping this month to targeted customers and partners.

“Flash storage is dramatically changing data center economics and performance,” said Ty McConney, VP, flash solutions, NetApp. “Increasingly customers are looking to an industry leader like NetApp to help them evolve their IT approaches and effectively integrate flash into their infrastructure. Like NetApp Data ONTAP, FlashRay is designed from the ground up and helps customers to remove compromise from consideration when assessing flash alternatives. This new platform will revolutionize storage by delivering maximum performance and simplified data management with low-cost media and the industry’s most efficient storage approach.”

NetApp’s enterprise flash technology and solutions address every flash-accelerated workload requirement. The portfolio includes the company’s E-Series and FAS hybrid flash arrays and its EF-Series and all-flash FAS all-flash arrays. Complementing these platforms are FlexPod Datacenter with all-flash FAS arrays and NetApp’s support and professional services to help organizations decide how to best realize the benefits of flash in their current and future environments from the data center to the cloud.

“Samsung and NetApp have been working closely to help enterprise customers realize faster time-to-value for their flash investment,” said Jeeho Baek, VP, memory marketing, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. “Our advanced flash media, coupled with NetApp FlashRay, will improve the performance of mission-critical applications, and the economics of the enterprise data centers in which they run.”

Mars OS for Enterprise Flash Storage
The NetApp engineering team developed Mars OS to address the current and future challenges of flash storage performance, data efficiency, data management, and mobility across platforms and environments. The system includes technology built to address the challenges of flash storage, as well as incorporates IP from NetApp’s portfolio.

Among the innovations in this release are patented technologies related to ‘always-on’ in-line efficiency and a variable-length block layout that together minimize the I/O activity to flash, increase the effective capacity, and deliver high throughput at consistent submillisecond latency. These features enable customers to address a range of workloads FlashRay provides the ability to seamlessly upgrade to future solid-state technologies to further drive down the cost of all-flash storage.

“NetApp has defined an innovative approach to flash across its portfolio. We’ve deployed FlashRay in our testing environment and recognized its ability to combine the always-on efficiencies with performance,” said Doug Katz, data center practice manager of Georgia, Presidio, Inc. “FlashRay will be a solid addition to NetApp’s data efficiency for the enterprise.“

As part of the company’s roadmap, NetApp will integrate the Mars OS with its Data ONTAP software. It will enable data mobility among its platforms, enabling enterprises to move data to the right storage tier as part of a comprehensive data lifecycle management strategy. Scale-out technologies will enable the seamless addition of performance and capacity as needed.

This initial release of FlashRay flash storage array is available to select customers and partners.

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And purpose-built FlashRay with de-dupe and compression generally available in 2014