Half the performance for half the price: NetApp’s new cut down StorageGRID load balancer

NetApp has launched a low-end StorageGRID appliance called the SG100 to cater for small deployments. The new system is a cut-down version of the load-balancing SG1000 and it delivers roughly half the performance and scale at half the price of its big sister.

There are six systems in the StorageGRID object storage line-up; the fast all-flash SGF6024, three higher-capacity all-disk SG6060, SG5760, SG5712, and a gateway load balancing SG1000 with no storage. The new SG100 is a combined gateway node (with load-balancer) and admin node appliance for SMB customers.

Steven Pruchniewski, NetApp tech marketing manager said in a blog post, the “new StorageGRID appliance unlocks the full power of on-prem object storage for smaller environments”. He claimed the SG100 “offers the simplest, more [sic] performant load balancing technology on the market in a cost-effective, purpose-built appliance designed for customers with small- to mid-size object storage needs.”

Our table showing the basic StorageGrid products positioned SG100 positioned at the far right, low-end position:

Here are NetApp comparisons of the SG1000 and SG100:

There is a mistake in the lower image, which should read 40 cores @ 2.1GHz for the SG1000.

Load balancing

Object storage load balancing software distributes the IO traffic across the available object storage nodes so as to avoid any one node getting overloaded and slowing down. NetApp’s software creates pools of storage nodes, adds and removes nodes on the fly, and establishes health checks.

SG1000 innards.

The optional management software provides an admin and storage tenant portal UI and API endpoint. It can also collect metrics from all nodes for monitoring and alerting.

According to NetApp, other object storage suppliers require customers to obtain a third-party load-balancer, whereas it has its own specifically-designed and integrated software and hardware.

Pricing is as follows: SG1000 = $99,000, SG100 = $49,900. The SG100 is available on Dec. 21, 2020.