System Fabric Works With New Focus on NetApp E-Series

NetApp E-Series products are a higher-performance alternative to the NetApp FAS products.

Part of the trade in using E-Series is higher complexity in exchange for higher levels of performance. Deployment of E-Series storage typically requires additional engineering and expertise beyond what is needed for FAS, since E-Series comes without a built-in file system.

System Fabric Works, Inc. (SFW) has increased its E-Series expertise via the hiring of a chief systems architect, Roger Ronald, who has been an architect and user of E-Series storage for more than a decade. Adding Roger’s end-user experience to SFW’s extensive capabilities in high-speed storage protocols gives SFW ability to architect and deploy E-Series solutions:

• SFW has more than a decade of experience with mission-critical 24×7 deployments using NetApp E-Series storage. These systems ranged from dozens of servers to as many as 400.
• SFW customers include NASA’s Ames, Naval Research Labs, Los Alamos and Sandia National Labs.
• SFW is a Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) driver software and firmware. The firmware for the E-Series IB interface is written by SFW. And most of the IB driver code in servers uses the OFED stack, in large part originally written and updated by SFW.
• SFW has understanding of performance file systems appropriate for E-Series. It knows CVFS, GPFS, and Lustre.
• SFW is skilled at sizing for storage performance. It understands how E-Series cache mirroring and 3rd party file system behaviors can impact performance.
• SFW knows how to eliminate or reduce storage bottlenecks. It knows the functional and performance requirements for meta-data and how to deal with hot-spots.
• SFW has a quick and accurate methodology to predict storage performance during the proposal phase of projects.

SFW (through relationship with a partner in the Ft Meade area) is able to install, integrate, and service E-Series storage in facilities that require virtually any level of security access.