Entry-Level NetApp All-SSD FAS2500 Up to 576TB

George Kurian, EVP, product operations, NetApp, Inc., said: “Our unified scale-out FAS storage systems integrate the latest flash, networking, and processor technology innovations with the advanced storage and data management capabilities of the world’s #1 branded storage OS , Data ONTAP, to accelerate the performance of the most demanding business-critical applications. With today’s introduction of our highest-performance FAS system ever and our best-value entry product family, we at NetApp provide enterprises and service providers with the opportunity to streamline and make their storage infrastructures substantially more efficient while building in the flexibility to rapidly respond to real-time business priorities.”

With more global organizations transforming IT operations to keep pace with evolving business requirements, NetApp has enhanced its system and software portfolio to provide the flexibility and choice required for current and future enterprise application environments.

It introduced two new storage system platforms-the extreme-performance FAS8080 EX and the entry value-priced FAS2500. With the FAS8080 EX, growing organizations and service providers can confidently drive the performance-intensive SAN and NAS workloads at the largest scale. The new entry-level FAS2500 hybrid arrays can simplify operations, increase productivity through integration with ecosystems, extend system life, and minimize future costs.

FAS2500

Technology News in Depth

Performance and scale with FAS8080 EX
NetApp’s most powerful, patented scale-out array ever, FAS8080 EX is purpose-built for the most demanding business-critical applications. The resilient FAS8080 EX scales to ~4 million I/Os of performance and offers quality-of-service capabilities to enable predictable performance that meets or exceeds service-level objectives. For high-speed, low-latency applications, it can be configured either as an all-flash array with >4.6PB of flash storage or as a hybrid array with a flash cache of nearly half a petabyte. Additionally, it dynamically responds to growing data requirements with scaling to nearly 70PB of capacity and more than 600 I/O connections, which are critical for service providers and large organizations that are consolidating workloads.

Price/performance with FAS2500
It offers expanded flash support to accelerate workloads by up to 46% and increase usable capacity by 48. With enterprise data management capabilities, the FAS2500 harnesses the power of its patented Data ONTAP storage OS to simplify data management across the entire enterprise IT environment-from the local office to the datacenter to the cloud. Organizations can scale operations as their needs evolve. In addition, customers can better manage acquisition costs while mitigating risk of disruption to business operations. Customers can also reduce setup time and eliminate repetitive operations with software management capabilities that automate tasks with the click of a button.

All-Flash FAS configurations that combine hardware performance with software intelligence
NetApp maximizes the value of flash across the entire compute, network, and storage stack with a comprehensive flash portfolio, improving efficiency and accelerating business-critical application performance. For customers who need the high performance and low latency of flash along with the enterprise reliability and extensive data management capabilities of Data ONTAP software, all-flash configurations of the FAS8000 are available. For example, all-flash configurations of the FAS8080 EX and FAS8060 provide a solution for VDI deployments with high-IO/s and low-latency requirements, and for business critical application database workloads. A new All-Flash FAS Reference Architecture for VDI – that delivers performance and low cost per desktop – is available. By offering a portfolio that includes both hybrid and all-flash storage offerings, NetApp is enabling IT organizations to optimize the level of performance, efficiency, and scalability to meet their needs. NetApp sold 18PB of flash in FY14 Q4, with 93PB of flash storage to date.

Business critical application support
The FAS unified scale-out storage system portfolio is designed to support the demanding enterprise application workloads. The FAS unified scale-out architecture enables organizations to adapt to changing business needs, while delivering on core IT requirements for uptime, scalability, and cost-efficiency. Enterprise applications, including those from VMware, Oracle, Microsoft, Citrix, and SAP, run fast, efficiently and reliably. The hybrid architecture, combined with patented storage clustering technology, maximizes uptime and delivers low-latency performance to enable predictable application performance.

NetApp Services for OnCommand Insight
For enterprises and service providers who are required to manage their virtualized and cloud environments, OnCommand Insight provides a patented solution that enables storage cost management, rationalization, and optimization of storage services. It is a tailored service offering for customers who deploy high-end FAS8000 systems across heterogeneous datacenters. This customized service offering leverages NetApp resources, tools, and best practices to construct IT analytics with relevant dashboards and reporting capabilities that are aligned to a customer’s particular business parameters. Customers achieve the business value they need to more effectively and self-sufficiently manage their physical, virtualized, and cloud environments.

Newest Storage Systems Offer a 90-Day Payment Holiday
NetApp is offering a 90-day payment holiday allowing customers to save while transitioning to the newest enterprise storage solutions.

Eric Tuley, director of IS operations, Arbitration Forums, Inc., said: “With Arbitration Forum’s escalating business growth, IT has strict service leve objectives to meet our growing memberhip’s uptime requirements. By choosing clustered Data ONTAP management framework, we have not only exceeded requirements but extended the benefits of performance, deduplication, simplified management, and integrated data protection across our NetApp and third party arrays. We have easily integrated NetApp technology and our organization’s extensive VMware environment as well as preserved close to $2 million in existing storage.”

Gary Trible, manager of IT infrastructure, Accuride International, Inc., said: “Accuride has improved service levels and time to market by virtualizing business-critical applications on Cisco and NetApp FlexPod infrastructure. Applications such as Exchange Server, SQL Server and SharePoint are business-critical to our company. We use them constantly to communicate with our suppliers and collaborate internally. Any unplanned downtime comes at a cost, but luckily that doesn’t happen with NetApp.“

Pat Cimprich, VP and global infrastructure services chief architect, Avanade, Inc., said: “Our private cloud supports our 24/7 consulting work developing business-critical solutions, so any downtime comes at a great cost to not only Avanade but also our customers. With clustered Data ONTAP, we are able to scale business-critical customer workloads for capacity and performance as well as collaborate with the confidence that our environment will remain nondisruptive. We’ve improved time to market for consulting projects and improved business agility.”

Tony Beaird, manager of server, storage and IT security infrastructures, DuPage Medical Group, said: “We depend on NetApp storage for the management and delivery of our business-critical applications, including electronic medical records and medical images. Cisco and NetApp FlexPod infrastructure helps our doctors and clinicians access data and images anytime from anywhere. And, clustered Data ONTAP helps us avoid any service interruption, whether hardware failure or OS patching, by allowing us to roll our environment between nodes without downtime. This type of infrastructure is necessary in healthcare where time and accessibility is essential for successful patient care.”

Matthew Leeds, VP of operations, Gracenote, Inc., said: “The number of queries to our global media database has grown from 10 million daily queries in the early years to now more than 500 million. This type of growth demands a reliable storage infrastructure with no corruption, downtime, loss of data or availability. NetApp FAS storage systems offer consistent reliable technology that is always ahead of our needs. In 12 years, we’ve never had to make a platform change, and that’s been of immeasurable value to us.”

Severin Canisius, senior IT manager, Jack Wolfskin Hausrüstung Für Draussen GmbH, said: “With our private cloud infrastructure based on NetApp storage and Microsoft, Jack Wolfskin was able to expand internationally into new markets without increasing our IT budget or IT staffing levels. Our infrastructure now supports non-stop operations critical to the growth and success of the business. Since the implementation, we doubled the number of retail outlets worldwide, experienced 20% year-over-year growth, and increased annual shipments by 86%.”

Aleksandar Milosavljevic, CTO, Mainstream Technology Group, said: “Since 2008, NetApp has helped Mainstream start small and grow our storage and feature set. We are now the largest provider of web hosting services in Serbia today, hosting 8 out of the 10 most popular websites/portals in the country, providing 24×7 support with guaranteed availability at 99.99% per month. NetApp FAS storage systems and Flash technologies have helped us meet any challenge-whether it’s growth, capacity, performance, or redundancy. We don’t have to think whether we can maybe do something, we simply do with NetApp.”

Casey Jones, CTO, Quasar Data Center, said: “With NetApp’s FAS storage systems running clustered Data ONTAP and NetApp Flash technology, we are able to stay competitive in the fast changing world of cloud computing. NetApp allows us to scale our storage and upgrade our IT environment without any downtime,,ich becomes critical to our success as we grow our customer base and offer higher service-level objectives. Other benefits including reduced storage management requirements and latency of up to 80% increases our staff productivity.“

Don O’Connor, SVP, technology operations division manager, Union Bank, NA, said: “The ability to service and expand our storage infrastructure without downtime is essential to the business-critical nature of Union Bank’s e-commerce applications. Therefore, we chose Cisco and NetApp FlexPod infrastucture to reduce risk and increase IT fficiency, supporting our private cloud and allowing us to scale. And with clustered Data ONTAP, we can perform upgrades and load balance for capacity and performance in a nondisruptive manner.”

Sameer Dholakia, group VP and GM, cloud platforms group, Citrix Systems, Inc., said: “The Citrix and NetApp relationship has evolved to continue providing our joint customers with solutions for some of the most demanding enterprise application workloads. The new NetApp FAS storage systems will continue to be a key component for customers using Citrix mobile workspace technologies, such as CloudPlatform, XenDesktop, and ShareFile.”

Bev Crair, GM, storage division, Intel Corporation, said: “Intel and NetApp are providing innovative solutions that power scalable and intelligent data infrastructures. With today’s announcement, NetApp leverages the power of the Intel Xeon Processors to provide data infrastructure spanning from their extreme performance FAS8080 EX to their entry value priced FAS2500. The combination of NetApp’s storage systems based on Intel architecture provides the agility needed for businesses to manage the ever-challenging demands of data growth.”

Sanjay Katyal, VP, global strategic alliances and OEMs, VMware, Inc., said: “VMware shares a common vision with NetApp to accelerate customers’ path to the cloud and deliver IT as a service. Our partnership continues to evolve to enable customers to derive maximum value within the cloud. NetApp’s new FAS storage systems, coupled with VMware solutions for end-user computing and the software-defined datacenter, will continue to help customers adapt quickly to changing business needs as they accelerate their cloud transition.“