NetApp has refreshed the low end of its all-flash A-Series AFF arrays following the May midrange and high-end upgrade. It has also updated the capacity-optimized C-Series hardware and added functionality to StorageGRID object storage software.
Customers can now access its storage “at more accessible entry points, making it easier to scale up from a smaller starting point or expand their capabilities to remote and branch locations,” Net App said in a statement.
Sandeep Singh, Enterprise Storage SVP and GM at NetApp, described the updated A-Series as “more powerful, intelligent, and secure”, and said the C-Series is more “scalable, efficient, and secure.”
A-Series
Until May, NetApp’s ONTAP-powered A-Series comprised the A150, A250, A400, A800, and A900. The bigger the number, the more powerful the system, with generally faster controllers and higher capacity as we move up the range. That naming was discontinued for certain systems in May when the company added three new models: A70, A90, and A1K (not A1000), which refreshed the A400, A800, and A900 – the midrange and high-end A-Series. No end of availability was announced for the A400, A800, and A900.
A major hardware change included the move to Intel’s Sapphire Rapids gen 4 Xeon SP processors.
Now NetApp has attended to the low end (A20, A30, and A50 systems), saying they have “sub-millisecond latency with up to 2.5x better performance over their predecessors.” That implies they get Sapphire Rapids CPUs as well. No end of availability has been announced for the existing low-end A150 and A250 arrays either.
The AFF A20 starts at 15.35 TB. The AFF A30 can scale to more than 1 PB of raw storage. The AFF A50, we’re told, delivers twice the performance of its predecessor in a third of the rack space.
Logic would suggest the A20 is the new low-end model, with the A30 positioned to replace the A150, and the A250 giving way to the A50. The implied new A-Series range, once the prior models are declared end-of-life, will be the A20, A30, A50, A70, A90, and A1K. NetApp has provided tech specs for the new systems;
Competitor Dell upgraded its PowerStore unified file and block storage arrays to gen 4 Xeon processors in May, with the range starting at the 500T and extending through the 1200T, 3200T, and 3200Q systems to the high-end 5200T and 9200T.
C-Series
Compared to the A-Series, NetApp’s C-Series are higher-capacity and lower cost all-flash ONTAP arrays using QLC (4bits/cell) SSDs. In February last year, the range consisted of three products – the C250, C400, and C800 – which all scaled out to 24-node clusters. They use NVMe drives, and the smallest, the C250 in a 2RU chassis, had 1.5 PB of effective capacity.
NetApp says there are new AFF C30, C60, and C80 systems with “an industry-leading 1.5 PB of storage capacity in two-rack [unit] deployments.” No change there, then. We’re told by Singh they are ”scalable, efficient, and secure.”
StorageGRID
StorageGRID is an on-premises scale-out, S3-compatible object storage system. The existing high-end SGF6112 product now supports 60 TB SSDs, “doubling the density of object deployments,” NetApp said in a statement. The previous maximum raw SSD capacity was 368.4 TB using 12 x 30.7 TB drives in the 1RU chassis. These drives were introduced last May. Doubling that would imply 736.8 TB from 12 x 61.4 TB drives. Both Samsung and Solidigm supply 61.44 TB QLC SSDs.
The StorageGRID object storage software has been upgraded to v11.9 “with increased bucket counts.” It can now have “metadata-only and data-only nodes for increased performance with small object workloads and mixed-media grids.”
