NetApp Updates Its FAS Midrange Storage Systems

Balancing the data infrastructure realities of today with the growth promise of tomorrow, NetApp has updated its FAS midrange storage systems with the introduction of the FAS3220 and FAS3250. The new systems deliver a mix of performance, capacity scaling, and value to create an infrastructure foundation that accelerates business growth.

Designed for stringent SAN and NAS environments, the new FAS storage systems help enterprises and midsized businesses that are consolidating operations onto a shared storage platform improve performance by up to80% and increase storage capacity up to 100% over existing midrange products. Native support for high-speed, low-latency Flash and industry-leading non disruptive operations provides organisations with the necessary foundation for an intelligent, immortal, and infinitely scalable agile data infrastructure.

“Most enterprises, despite uncertain economic conditions, continue to aggressively invest in technology leaders that can drive agility cost savings into their IT infrastructure,” said Brendon Howe, vice president, Product and Solutions Marketing, NetApp. “Our new unified midrange products are optimised for both mission-critical SAN and NAS environments, leverage technologies such as Flash and clustered Data ONTAP to address today’s performance and capacity needs and nonstop operations, and are architected to scale for future needs.”

The FAS3200 series is a flexible platform that can be tailored for virtualised, private cloud or traditional environments, requiring only a few terabytes of storage to over 2PB in a single system. When clustered, a FAS infrastructure can scale performance and capacity across 24 storage nodes. This architecture provides significant performance and capacity scale while delivering non disruptive operations by enabling transparent upgrades, system replacements, and performance balancing.

Clustered Data ONTAP enhances industry-leading NetApp Data ONTAP storage operating system features by enabling high-availability storage platforms, such as FAS3220 and FAS3250, to operate as a shared pool of resources. This capability offers massive scalability and performance, simplified management, and the ability to transparently migrate application data. Data ONTAP is the number one storage operating system and—in a single, feature-rich data management platform—offers data protection, massive scalability, thin provisioning, deduplication, thin clones, Snapshot copies, backup, and disaster recovery.

To ease expansion and allow system customisation, the new systems include up to three times the number of PCIe expansion slots, which can be used to support network cards, Flash Cache cards, and additional storage connectivity.

Both the FAS3220 and FAS3250 systems are designed to boost application responsiveness and performance by leveraging NetApp’s powerful Flash technologies, all of which are designed to provide fully automated, virtual storage tiering. NetApp Flash Cache, which is a controller-based PCIe card, speeds data access through intelligent caching of recently read user data and metadata in the storage controller.