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Flash Technology and Solid State Drives
NetApp will use flash technology in innovative ways to meet your performance needs while saving power, cooling costs, and data center space.

Learn more about NetApp’s plan for flash technology. (PDF)

Boost Performance with Flash Technology and SSDs

Although the storage capacity of hard disk drives has grown steadily over the years, disk performance has increased at a slower rate. Consequently, large numbers of fast-spinning drives are often needed to provide the I/O throughput required for many application workloads. The result can be wasted storage capacity and excessive consumption of power, cooling, and data center space.

Solid state technology, especially NAND flash memory, is reshaping enterprise storage by speeding data access and displacing hard disk drives. Flash provides more than 10x faster response times than the fastest hard disk drives and I/O throughput comparable to large numbers of disks.

At NetApp our approach is to apply solid state technology in innovative ways to meet your performance needs and to use disk-based storage more efficiently. We are doing this with both caching and persistent storage products.

The NetApp® Performance Acceleration Module (PAM), an intelligent read cache, gives you a new way to optimize the performance of your storage system for workloads that are random read intensive, such as file services and messaging. PAM lets you use fewer, larger disk drives to achieve the same levels of performance and storage capacity while providing ongoing savings of rack space and electricity. We have achieved impressive results with the first-generation, DRAM version of the Performance Acceleration Module. A larger, flash-based version of the PAM is coming in 2009.

You can also deploy solid state drives (SSDs) as an ultrafast tier of persistent storage behind NetApp controllers. We have forged a partnership with Texas Memory Systems to unite the industry-leading performance of their SSD arrays with our advanced data management and storage efficiency capabilities. Now you can accelerate the performance of critical databases and applications by combining the TMS RamSan-500 flash SSD array with our V-Series open storage controllers.

NetApp Unified Storage Architecture multiplies the benefits of flash by using it more efficiently and for more purposes. Storage efficiency features such as deduplication make the most of this expensive commodity and translate into savings of power, cooling, and space as disk drives are eliminated. NetApp can meet your needs for both SAN and NAS performance on a single platform with flash technology, so more applications and users can realize the benefits.