News

posted on 10 June 2008 06:52

NetApp has upgraded two of its three FAS3000 mid-range unified storage products with faster CPUs and more memory.

The FAS3040 and FAS3070 become the FAS3140 and FAS3170 featuring dual core CPUs and more DRAM in their controllers. John Rollason, NetApp's EMEA Solutions Marketing Manager, said they were both up to 40 percent faster. There are equivalent V3140 and V3170 products which virtualise non-NetApp storage attached to them.

This is purely a hardware refresh, there being no upgrade of Data ONTAP, the operating system in the FAS and V-Series products.

Both the 3140 and 3170 products can now have active:active controllers providing failover if one controller stops, for enhanced availability. Such controllers come in a single 6U rack enclosure instead of the 3U enclosure used for the single controller as before. The single controller option is still available however.

Rollason said the hardware refresh gave NetApp customers a 65 percent performance advantage over EMC customers with Celerra NS products.

NetApp has published a new industry standard performance benchmark for file services storage workloads, which are prevalent in engineering data centres and technical computing. It  posted a SPEC_SFS97 score of 137,306 IOPS with 0.94ms overall response time (ORT) with the FAS3170. The complete benchmark results will shortly be be found at www.spec.org/sfs97r1/results/.

The existing entry-level FAS3000 product, the 3020, remains available, however Rollason said: "There is no end-of-life announced but it is in a transition period."

He said, setting apart the branch office FAS200, NetApp generally has two products in an entry level range (FAS2000), a two or three mid-range line (FAS3100), and two products in the high end (FAS6000). Each hardware range is generally refreshed roughly about 18 months after it was first introduced and: "We can expect more of the same."

The FAS3000s were first launched in May, 2005, with the FAS3040 having a March 2007 announcement. The FAS6000s were introduced in May, 2006, with enhancements made in December 2007.

All FAS products use 3.5-inch hard drives with 1TB drives now supported. Rollason said: "We have plans for 2.5 inch drive support, but no firm detail that I can share (yet)."

The starting U.S. list price for FAS3100 storage systems  is $69,780
(which includes 7TB of storage). The starting U.S. list price for  V3100 storage systems is $56,365 (no storage included).  

Separately NetApp has announced FAS internal fit Performance Acceleration Modules for increasing performance through DRAM caching, and a Storage Acceleration Appliance acting as a performance-improving cache in front of NetApp arrays.

NetApp has also announced a Remote Support Agent, as a firmware upgrade. It is a intelligent remote diagnostics data collector. The Remote Support Agent will proactively open support tickets and allow NetApp support engineers to remotely access system log files to quickly diagnose and resolve issues.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}