NetApp unveiled new products this week with a message that could be summed up in a word: performance.
The new offerings, which include midrange unified storage systems and a storage acceleration appliance, are aimed at helping data centers and high-performance computing environments do more with less. NetApp cites as target markets software development, product lifecycle management, electronic design automation, healthcare, energy, media/entertainment and government.
"It's all about time to market with these environments, and that's where performance really helps," said Patrick Rogers, NetApp's vice president for solutions marketing.
NetApp claims its new FAS3140 and FAS3170 storage systems offer better performance and scalability than other midrange systems, and the company included a benchmark showing that the FAS3170 outperformed the EMC Celerra NS80G in a file services workload benchmark
The FAS3140 scales to 420TB and the FAS3170 to 420TB, and both support and offer eight I/O slots.
The company also unveiled the new V-Series V3140 and V3170, which it says extends virtualization to other vendors' legacy arrays and uses the same Data ONTAP operating system as other NetApp FAS systems.
The Storage Acceleration Appliances, which include the SA200, SA300 and SA600, are based on NetApp FlexCache technology. Rogers said the appliances can double throughput while reducing latency. They can be used to accelerate performance at the data center where the central data repository is located or to improve response time and enhance collaboration within Remote Technical Support offices.
NetApp is also offering a Performance Acceleration Module, an add-on intelligent read cache for optimizing performance of mainstream storage platforms and random-read intensive workloads such as file serving. One or more modules fit into PCI Express slots of an existing storage controller, where they function as a read cache to increase throughput and reduce latency without having to add additional disk drives to increase I/O rates. The module consumes 95 percent less power than a shelf of Fibre Channel disk drives.
NetApp also introduced Remote Technical Support Agent, an intelligent Remote Technical Supportdiagnostics data collector embedded in NetApp systems, which will proactively open support tickets and let NetApp support engineers remotely access system log files to diagnose and resolve issues.
List prices for the FAS3100 storage systems start at $69,780 for 7TB of storage, while the V3100 systems start at $56,365 with no storage included. The Performance Acceleration Module lists at $15,000, and the software for the module is $20,000. One software license is required for each storage controller, and between one and five modules can be installed in the controller, depending on the model. Pricing for the Storage Acceleration Appliance models varies depending on the configurations, number of disk shelves and Performance Acceleration Modules.
Source : enterpriseitplanet.com/storage/news/article.php/3752806
