Netapp Customers Purchase More Than a Petabyte of Flash Cache for Greater Performance and Storage Efficiency
Sydney, AUSTRALIA - 16 June 2010
- NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) customers looking to improve
performance and storage efficiency
have purchased more than one petabyte (PB) of NetApp® Flash
Cache capacity since its introduction in September 2009. By
incorporating flash memory as intelligent cache in its unified storage systems,
NetApp helps customers optimise performance without adding
complexity, while decreasing both capital and operating expenses.
Customer adoption and industry standard tests underscore NetApp's
success in helping customers make the most of their data centers
with Flash Cache.
As an alternative to adding a storage tier of
solid state disks, NetApp applies solid state technology as
intelligent cache to optimise performance for workloads such as
file services, messaging, virtual infrastructure, and Online
Transaction Processing databases. Flash Cache modules are easy to
install, require no ongoing administration, and automatically cache
data that is under high demand to provide read times at least 10
times faster than hard disk drives and to help reduce storage
system costs by up to 50% for mainstream applications. Each Flash
Cache module can provide performance equivalent to dozens of
high-performance disk drives, helping customers realise substantial
savings by configuring storage systems with fewer, larger, and
cheaper hard disk drives.
"Using flash memory to automatically cache
frequently accessed data gives customers the speed and
accessibility they need without sacrificing simplicity and
efficiency," said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Solutions and
Alliances at NetApp. "Customers have validated our distinct
approach to solid state technology by purchasing more than 5,000
caching modules so far. They also buy Flash Cache with nearly 20%
of the systems for which it is available, which is significantly
higher than estimated attach rates for vendors that offer flash as
persistent storage. Caching can give customers an easy,
cost-effective way to apply solid state technology for better
storage system performance."
One NetApp customer seeing real-world
benefits from Flash Cache is Apache Corporation. Apache is a
US$29.53 billion independent energy company that explores,
develops, and produces natural gas, crude oil, and natural gas
liquids. To meet growing customer demand, Apache is placing greater
emphasis on its exploration and production efforts. This involves
intensive geologic and seismic modeling using a collaborative,
high-performance 64-bit Windows environment. In the last four
years, data volumes have grown 700%, to 3.5PB. Apache uses Flash
Cache to optimise its exploration efforts and shorten the time it
takes to get product to its customers.
"Decreasing our time to discov¬ery is
vital to the company's continued success, and we need solutions
that can keep up with the pace and scale of exploration and give us
a competitive advan¬tage," said Bradley Lauritsen, manager of
Exploration Computing at Apache Corp. "With NetApp Flash Cache,
we're seeing nearly a 70% cache hit rate in a shared seismic
working environment, eliminating the need for the system to
retrieve data from the SATA drives 70% of the time. This helps
deliver data in seconds instead of minutes or tens of minutes,
which keeps our geoscientists working efficiently and
effectively."
The effectiveness of Flash Cache has also
been demonstrated with the industry standard SPECsfs2008 benchmark
for Windows file services. In a set of three published results,
NetApp demonstrated that a storage system with Flash Cache and SATA
disk drives can provide 50% more capacity and deliver performance
comparable to the same system configured with more than twice as
many high-performance Fibre Channel disk drives. The configuration
with Flash Cache and SATA drives also costs 57% less per terabyte,
uses 59% less rack space, and reduces power consumption by 66%. To
view the Flash Cache SPECsfs2008 benchmark results, visit
www.spec.org/sfs2008/results/res2010q2/.
Flash Cache modules (previously called PAM
II) use enterprise-grade SLC NAND flash memory and are available in
256GB and 512GB sizes, allowing up to 4TB of intelligent cache per
storage system. NetApp now also offers 2TB SATA disk drives, which
together with Flash Cache can reduce overall storage costs without
compromising performance for many applications.
To learn more about NetApp Flash Cache, visit
www.netapp.com/au/products/storage-systems/flash-cache/.
For more details about Apache Corporation's
use of NetApp technology, go to www.netapp.com/us/library/customer-stories/apache-corp.html
. For additional perspective on NetApp's petabyte achievement,
visit Mike Riley's blog at http://blogs.netapp.com/efficiency/.
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About NetApp
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Media Contact:
Rachel York
Max Australia
+61 2 9954 3492
rachel.york@maxaustralia.com.au
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