NetApp EF600 AFA Mid-Range Storage Array for Analytics and HPC

NetApp, Inc. announced the EF600 storage array.

It is an end-to-end NVMe midrange array that accelerates access to data and empowers companies to develop insights for performance-sensitive workloads.

Organizations are looking for ways to improve the speed and responsiveness of the applications that control their critical business operations. Because application performance is a key driver of time to market, revenue, and customer satisfaction, it’s crucial that companies operate at the highest levels with efficiency. The end-to-end NVMe EF600 array doubles the performance of currently available AFAs that use the SAS protocol. The firm offering as companies continue to make the move to flash. This technology allows organizations to accelerate write IO/s and R/W throughput with an end-to-end NVMe storage system that’s purpose-built for HPC workloads.

EF600 storage array rear

“The storage industry is currently transitioning from the SAS to the NVMe protocol, which increases the speed of access to data,” said Tim Stammers, senior analyst, 451 Research. “But conventional storage systems do not fully exploit NVMe performance, because of latencies imposed by their main controllers. NetApp’s E-Series systems were designed to address this architectural issue and are already used widely in performance-sensitive applications. The EF600 sets a new level of performance for the E-Series by introducing end-to-end support for NVMe, and should be considered by IT organizations looking for high-speed storage to serve analytics and other data-intensive applications.“

“NetApp has been a leader in supporting Mellanox NVMe-oF network controllers on their EF-Series and E-Series arrays, including both NVMe/IB and NVMe/RoCE available with the latest EF600 platform,” said Rob Davis, VP, storage technology, Mellanox Technologies Ltd. “We look forward to continuing our partnership of innovation with NetApp to accelerate the industry’s transition to NVMe-oF.“

“Getting value and insights quickly and reliably from a range of mixed workload environments can allow organizations to differentiate from their competitors and accelerate their time to market,” said Robin Huber, VP and GM, E-Series, NetApp. “The EF600 helps customers unlock the value of their data and rapidly develop insights that were previously unrealistic for performance-sensitive workloads such as Oracle databases, real-time analytics, and high-performance computing applications on top of a BeeGFS high-performance parallel file system.“

The EF600 AFA delivers two million sustained IO/s, response times under 100μs, and 44GB/s of throughput and offers a price/performance ratio for enterprise workloads. With the array’s simplicity, the modular design and simple management tools make it easy to scale the EF600 without adding management complexity.

Resource:
Blog: Drive Extreme Performance for Analytics and HPC Workloads