News

posted on 10 June 2008 07:48

NetApp is announcing a Storage Acceleration Appliance (SAA) that sits in front of its storage arrays and boosts NFS I/O performance by caching I/O requests.

There are three models:  SA200; SA300; and SA600, which are based on the FAS2000, 3000 and 6000 products respectively.

John Rollason, NetApp's EMEA Solutions Marketing Manager, says that, in effect, NetApp has productised its FlexCache technology in Data ONTAP, its storage array operating system. FlexCache uses NetApp array disk drives as an NFS cache: "Some rendering farms use this feature for better IOPS rates. We've taken FlexCache and turned it into an appliance."

"It's specifically about NFS caching, not CIFS at this stage."

Use of the SAA is indicated when a NetApp storage array becomes either CPU-bound or generally I/O-bound with NFS work. If it is read I/O-limited then Performance Acceleration Module (PAM) use is indicated instead. The state of NetApp arrays in this regard will be indicated by the Predictive Cache Statistics feature, introduced in Data ONTAP 7.2.1.

The SAA is not a network acceleration product, reducing TCP/IP 'chattiness' as do Riverbed and Silver Peak Wide Area Data Services (WADS) accelerators. Nor does it carry out data deduplication as such products do, that being performed by the A-SIS feature in Data ONTAP.

The SAA will only function in front of NetAPP FAS or V-series products. The latter can have non-NetApp storage arrays attached to it.

Pricing for the Storage Acceleration Appliance models varies depending on the configurations, number of disk shelves, and Performance Acceleration Modules installed.

Separately NetApp has upgraded its mid-range products with a new FAS 3100 line and introduced PCI-e format Performance Acceleration Modules (PAM) cards for its products.

By introducing the PAM internal-fit caches and the SAA external cache appliance NetApp is responding to the sane increased I/O rate needs that are driving suppliers such as EMC, HDS and Sun to use forms of flash memory solid state disk (SSD) technology to boost storage and server-storage I/O rates.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}