New NetApp All-Flash Array

NetApp, Inc.‘s strategy centers on flash-accelerated, cloud-integrated storage solutions for a broad range of shared and dedicated infrastructure environments.

• The EF550 all-flash array delivers high performance and enterprise reliability for latency-sensitive data, accelerating database, web services, VDI, and other business-critical applications.
• The E2700 SAN array delivers to the enterprise optimal price/performance for remote/branch offices and small to medium-size businesses.
• The updated E5500 SAN array delivers performance, density, and modular flexibility for data-intensive workloads.

EF550

George Kurian, EVP, product operations, NetApp, said: “Our product innovation strategy is to deliver the   portfolio of cloud-integrated and flash-accelerated storage and data management solutions. These solutions satisfy our customers’ needs for their multiple workloads and deployment models – either dedicated or as part of a shared infrastructure. By expanding our EF-Series all-flash arrays and E-Series platforms we are meeting growing market demand for dense, performance-oriented architectures and delivering superior performance, reliability, efficiency and scale.”

By offering a broad and complete flash portfolio, NetApp maximizes the value of flash across the entire compute, network, and storage stack, improving efficiency and accelerating business-critical application performance. Every workload is different; that’s why NetApp’s portfolio of hybrid and all-flash arrays allows customers to create an optimal solution. The company has shipped over 60PB of flash storage to date.

The new platform releases continue to execute against the storage innovative roadmap, which recently included NetApp’s unveiling of a strategy for cloud integration. As organizations turn to hybrid cloud environments to optimize costs, seize opportunities, and mitigate risks, the company is providing its clustered Data ONTAP platform for seamless cloud management across any blend of private and public cloud resources. Already more than 175 cloud service providers deliver cloud services built on Data ONTAP. IDC named NetApp Data ONTAP as the world’s number-one branded storage OS.

EF550 All-Flash Array
It is a platform that keeps business operations running by delivering business results faster and improving the customer experience. It delivers consistent, predictable, submillisecond response times to accelerate the latency-sensitive applications responsible for driving revenue, productivity, and/or customer satisfaction on a day-in, day-out basis. Key applications include database, VDI, and web services. The EF550’s scale-up architecture provides more data access to low-latency performance while remote replication enables business-critical application to be fully protected at a remote site.

Operational costs are lowered with the EF550 due to the elimination of overprovisioning. In fact, a single EF550 is able to match the performance of two full racks of traditional spinning drives. This results in savings of space, power, and cooling.

E-Series
It innovates with Dynamic Disk Pools, Intelligent Cache Tiering with SSD Cache, the NetApp AutoSupport tool, remote replication in a simple array, and the latest release of 12G SAS. The E-Series is part of a portfolio of block-based, performance optimized storage. Scalable by design, it is for workloads requiring 99.999% reliability and consistently high performance.

• E2700: It offers simple and flexible management, allowing IT staff to focus on adding business value versus managing storage. IT departments can add storage capacity as their organizations grow without reconfiguring running applications. By introducing 12G SAS, it accelerates application performance for price/performance value. Seamless operations with seamless application integration meet the demands of any application environment with the support of FC, iSCSI, and SAS.
• E5500: The performance-efficient unit expands enterprise data protection with the SANtricity suite of data replication features and flexible interface offerings with 10Gb iSCSI and 16Gb FC, in addition to SAS and IB. With NetApp AutoSupport, users have enterprise monitoring and installed-base analytics for proactive operations. The E5500 scales to 1.5PB per system for data-intensive storage at scale.

Cloud-Integrated Storage Solutions
In 2013, NetApp discussed its vision to provide seamless data management and control across a blend of private and public cloud resources. By harnessing the versatility and efficiency of Data ONTAP, NetApp now delivers a universal data platform, enabling dynamic data portability and extensive customer choice across private cloud, public cloud service provider, and hyperscale cloud provider options.

The firm has more than 175 cloud service providers delivering over 300 cloud services built on Data ONTAP. It is the first and only major storage supplier building an ecosystem around a private storage solution for Amazon Web Services and was recognized as the Private cloud Partner of the Year by Microsoft. In addition, the # 1 integrated infrastructure platform, FlexPod, from Cisco and NetApp, is a proven platform for service providers and enterprises. FlexPod is deployed across multiple data centers and integrates on-premise private clouds with secure public clouds.

With a customer-centric approach that strikes the right balance between technology and business needs, NetApp solves the inherent data management challenges of a hybrid IT environment, helping customers realize the benefits of the cloud.

Rick Thompson, CIO, Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, LLP, said: “Our biggest internal project was transforming our technology environment into a seamless computing experience for our attorneys and other employees. The NetApp FlexPod platform with NetApp Flash Pool has dramatically improved our virtual desktop performance and exceeded our expectations. Not only are our employees more productive but our law firm is now in a much better position to win additional business, as well as attract and retain top talent.”

Michael Clark, CTO, Photobucket, said: “With more than 14 billion images and five million uploaded to our site daily, Photobucket is the definition of a cloud-based solution. The cloud and our need for cloud solutions is at the core of our business and by working with NetApp this focus will not waver. NetApp’s cloud strategy allows us to continue leveraging clustered Data ONTAP solutions so we are confident our cloud architecture is built on a solid and flexible architecture. NetApp has helped us build products our customers need and have allowed us to pass our top competitors.”

Casey Jones, CTO, Quasar Data Center, said: “Our customers demand the highest levels of IT performance to support their demanding business-critical operations. By deploying NetApp Flash Pool we have increased our capacity and scalability to the point where we can give our customers the performance they expect and deserve. In fact, NetApp Flash Pool has paid for itself in customer satisfaction.”

Tracy Parham, CIO, UNC Health Care System, said: “UNC Health Care and High Point Regional Health System, a member of the UNC Health Care system, have both selected NetApp’s EF-Series all-flash array solution to help our health care system enhance the performance, efficiency, and reliability of our private cloud infrastructure. Response time is critical to UNC Health Care clinical staff members and NetApp flash arrays enable us to make a difference and improve patient care by improving response time to patients.”

Ralf Lindenlaub, IT director, Universal-IT Services-Gesellschaft mbH, said: “The EF-Series all-flash array brought a seven times higher I/O performance for our Oracle databases. Simultaneously, latency decreased to 1/15 of its original value.”

Steve Miller, Ph.D, associate director for training and business development at the National Center for Spectator Sports Safety and Security (NCS4), University of Southern Mississippi, said: “The outstanding R/W performance, HA, and high density design of NetApp E-Series enables us to support more video systems with higher resolution and eases serviceability with no media downtime or lost video. The system is intuitive to operate and provides us with the ability to scale over time without system downtime.”

Jose Reinoso, VP, storage engineering, Silicon Graphics International Corp., said: “The question is not whether a drive will fail but when a drive fails, and how quickly the system can recover to full performance. Our customers who have deployed the SGI InfiniteStorage 5600 systems into multi-petabyte environments are impressed by the extremely low failure rate and rapid rebuild time made possible by NetApp’s RAID-6 innovation of Dynamic Disk Pools, enabling them to deliver consistent high performance, 365 days a year.”

Carson Schmidt, VP and GM of platform engineering, Teradata Labs, said: “At Teradata, we have been integrating with NetApp E-Series storage for almost 20 years to deliver optimal performance, unlimited scalability, and nonstop availability for our data warehouse customers. We have deployed 545PB of storage including 10.3PB of SSD storage [as of August 2013] in thousands of Teradata’s customer sites worldwide.”

Mike Trautman, central sales director, FusionStorm, said: “Our relationship with NetApp supports our ability to deliver innovative storage solutions that help our customers become more flexible and responsive. NetApp’s comprehensive product portfolio, coupled with FusionStorm’s engineering and integration expertise, supports evolving data center architectures and cloud-based delivery models. Their best-of-breed flash storage, scale-out platforms and cloud-integrated infrastructures enable us to meet our customers’ needs across a wide range of use cases and workloads.”

John Woodall, VP of engineering, Integrated Archive Systems (IAS), said: “NetApp and IAS are in the best possible position with these announcements from NetApp. The updated E-Series/EF-Series products address more workloads than ever, have a broad adoption in the market and along with the rest of the NetApp portfolio allow us to address any workload for any data in any deployment from the edge office to the core and into the cloud. This is innovation and maturity at its best.”

Brian Vislusky, director of Presidio, Inc.‘s strategic technology group, data center, said: “Presidio has looked to innovation from NetApp to enable our clients to meet the changing IT service demands of their businesses. By listening to clients and understanding their requirements, Presidio takes a practical approach in building solutions that include NetApp’s product portfolio. This approach has proven to be a successful model for Presidio to best serve our clients and provide the fastest path to realization of value. With NetApp’s announcement of their comprehensive flash portfolio and cloud integrated solutions, this continues to demonstrate NetApp’s ability to innovate and evolve their portfolio to address everything from application acceleration to service provisioning.”

Matt Cleland, director of storage solutions, Sirius Computer Solutions, said: “NetApp’s broad portfolio of storage offerings allows us to design a solution for our customers that is optimized for their requirements. From the extreme performance provided by the E-Series, to Non-Disruptive Operations provided by the FAS system with Clustered Data ONTAP, and Flash optimized offerings across the entire portfolio – NetApp has a great solution.”

Wayne Arvidson, VP marketing, ATTO Technology, Inc., said: “We are very excited to see the expansion of the industry-leading E-Series platform. ATTO’s portfolio of HBAs, switches, and appliances, backed by our heritage of managed latency, high bandwidth connectivity, perfectly complements the tremendous performance provided by these new E-Series products, which are implemented in the industry’s most demanding workflows.”

Seth Knox, VP of products, Atlantis Computing, Inc., said: “The NetApp EF550 all-flash array delivers the ultra-high performance and consistent low latency that is critical to successful desktop virtualization deployments. Our partnership with NetApp provides customers with a joint desktop virtualization solution that is simple to deploy, provides better-than-PC performance and scales to support thousands of desktops at a cost per desktop below a physical PC.”

David West, SVP of WW marketing and business development, CommVault Systems, Inc., said: “Through our thriving partnership, CommVault and NetApp are working closely to provide flexible, high-performance storage solutions that simplify IT operations and reduce risk and cost for thousands of customers and partners. We continue to develop integrated data and information management solutions that enable organizations to better protect, manage and access their data across multiple storage and archive environments, from on-premises to clouds, all running on NetApp and Simpana solutions.”