NetApp Accelerates Time to Market with New Engineering and High-Performance Computing Solutions
New FAS3100 and V3100 Storage System Series, Storage Acceleration Appliance, and Performance Acceleration Module Enable Customers to Transform Their Technical Computing Environments
SUNNYVALE, Calif.-June 10, 2008-NetApp (NASDAQ:
NTAP) today announced new solutions to help customers transform
their engineering data centers and high-performance computing
environments. With today's news, NetApp is delivering business
breakthroughs and enabling customers to achieve greater speed,
value, and efficiency with the following benefits:
- Accelerate time to market: Engineering customers can meet the
needs of their most demanding technical applications with a highly
scalable, high-performance system to speed product cycle times,
from concept to delivery and distribution.
- Improve engineering productivity: NetApp helps engineers
increase productivity and quickly react to changing market
conditions with efficient data access and data consistency, which
speed up simulation and improve global collaboration.
- Save all over the place: Customers can maximize the return on
their storage infrastructure by decreasing administrative overhead
and costs and achieving greater storage efficiency to reduce power,
space, and cooling.
"More than ever before, enterprises in the high-performance
computing market are under intense global competition and in need
of solutions that will help them get to market-and increase
revenues-faster," said Earl Joseph, program vice president, IDC.
"At the same time, budgets are remaining flat or decreasing in the
face of exploding storage needs. Many of these enterprises are
realizing that storage is just as important as their servers and
technical applications in their data centers. The more they can get
out of their storage systems, the more they can get out of their
science and engineering innovation."
To help customers get more performance and scalability out of
their storage, NetApp introduced the following new products:
- FAS3100 and V3100 storage system series: NetApp's new FAS3140
and FAS3170 storage systems enable customers to meet their diverse
storage needs and achieve high levels of availability for their
critical business operations and technical applications. The
NetApp® FAS3100 series provides improved performance and
scalability over other midrange storage systems. While competitive
offerings provide disparate products that create additional
integration and collaboration issues, NetApp helps customers
maximize their engineering staff productivity with a single unified
architecture approach and a common suite of application-aware
software and management tools that are inherent in the Data
ONTAP® operating system, including powerful features such as
thin provisioning, deduplication, Snapshot™, RAID-DP®,
and FlexVol®. NetApp's new V3140 and V3170 extend
virtualization to other vendors' legacy arrays and leverage the
same Data ONTAP operating system that is the foundation of all
virtualization functions and integration in NetApp FAS systems.
This gives customers the same architecture, software, and
management tools for a true, powerful differentiator in mutivendor
environments.
- Storage Acceleration Appliance: The Storage Acceleration
Appliance-which includes three models, the SA200, SA300, and
SA600-is based on NetApp FlexCache™ technology. It represents
the first caching appliance available from a major storage systems
vendor. It can be used to accelerate performance at the data center
where the central data repository is located or to improve response
time and enhance collaboration within remote offices. Now customers
can leverage FlexCache with both Data ONTAP 7G and Data ONTAP GX to
achieve better performance and protect their existing investments
without rearchitecting their technical computing
environments.
- Performance Acceleration Module: This add-on intelligent read
cache provides a new way to optimize performance of mainstream
storage platforms. Now customers have a cost-effective means for
improving performance for workloads that are random-read intensive
such as file serving. One or more modules fit into PCI Express
slots of an existing storage controller, where they function as a
read cache to increase throughput and reduce latency. This gives
customers a cost-effective, innovative way to scale their storage
systems without having to add additional disk drives to increase
I/O rates. Additionally, the module consumes 95% less power than a
shelf of Fibre Channel disk drives.
"Our data demands were skyrocketing because so much of the work
we do is cutting edge, and our scientists need to be able to keep
everything their research generates," said Greg Stazyk, systems
coordinator at the Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre (GSC). GSC
employs over 200 scientists and researchers and carries out genomic
research and bioinformatics using one of the most advanced
computing platforms in the world built on a high-performance
Linux® cluster.
"Sequencing production processes generate tens of millions of
files. In fact, a single volume can contain nearly 30 million
files," continued Stazyk. "We had absolutely reached the
performance, reliability, and manageability limits of our existing
file server structure. NetApp allowed us to keep pace with our
storage demands and keep our production pipelines operating
interruption free. As a result, biologist productivity has improved
dramatically, and we're doing a lot more with less budget than ever
before. The NetApp storage solution has enabled us to do better
science."
"IPLogic has a core focus which strongly revolves around the LAN
and WAN. Our partnership with NetApp allows us to provide a true
end-to-end data center solution where we can address the complete
technology lifecycle," said Chris Fox, director of Data Storage and
Protection, IPLogic, a leading communications technology solutions
provider and a Professional Services Certified Partner in the
NetApp VIP Program and participating partner in the Authorized
Professional Service Partner Program. "The NetApp unified
architecture takes the complexity out of data storage, and NetApp's
flexibility and scalability are unmatched in the marketplace. This
ease of use combined with increased storage utilization rates,
decreased disk TCO, and tight application integration allows us to
provide a great value to our customers."
NetApp Delivers Superior Performance in the Engineering
Data Center
With the introduction of the FAS3100 series, NetApp has published
two new industry standard performance benchmarks across different
storage workloads. Representing file services-based workloads,
which are prevalent in engineering data centers and technical
computing, NetApp posted a SPEC_SFS97 score of 137,306 IOPS with
0.94ms overall response time (ORT) with the FAS3170. Carrying on
the strong performance that NetApp published earlier this year in
transaction-based (OLTP) workloads, NetApp posted a new SPC
Benchmark 1 (SPC1™) score of 60,515.34 SPC-1 IOPS™ with
the FAS3170. These results show that NetApp FAS platforms continue
to provide data at rates needed to keep the most demanding
applications running smoothly. Complete benchmark results can be
found at www.spec.org/sfs97r1/results/
and
http://www.storageperformance.org/results/benchmark_results_spc1#a00066.
Enhanced Support Capabilities for the Engineering Data
Center
In addition to today's solutions and product news, NetApp
introduced enhanced support capabilities to help customers realize
the NetApp advantage in their engineering data centers. NetApp
Remote Support Agent is an intelligent remote diagnostics data
collector that is embedded in the NetApp system. Simple to use and
install, the Remote Support Agent will proactively open support
tickets and allow NetApp support engineers to remotely access
system log files to quickly diagnose and resolve issues. In
addition, NetApp Professional Services enable customers to realize
the full advantage of NetApp products for the engineering data
center with assessment, implementation, and management services
that accelerate customers' data center transformation. To learn
more about NetApp Professional Services, visit www.netapp.com/us/services/professional/.
"In today's competitive market environment and economic
uncertainty, customers are looking for innovative solutions and
support that will further drive cost and complexity out of their
data centers," said Jay Kidd, chief marketing officer at NetApp.
"We are helping customers transform their data centers to achieve a
greater competitive business advantage and solve real-world
problems of time to market and engineering staff productivity. We
are committed to driving innovation in the engineering and
high-performance computing data center that will deliver greater
performance and scalability and strengthen our promise of being a
trusted partner-something our customers and channel and technology
partners expect from NetApp."
Additional Resources
For more information on NetApp's vision for the future of
enterprise storage and a scale-out architecture, read the white
paper "Scale-Out Storage and the Dynamic Data Center," at
http://media.netapp.com/documents/wp-7042.pdf.
The paper describes the requirements for scale-out storage in the
enterprise in terms of resiliency, scalability, manageability, and
other factors and discusses the current state of NetApp scale-out
deployments as well as specific operational and business advantages
that the NetApp approach delivers to the enterprise data
center.
Also, visit NetApp TechTalk online events at www.netapp.com/news/techtalk/podcasts-on-demand.html
for a podcast with Jay Kidd, NetApp's chief marketing officer,
titled "Transforming the Engineering Data Center" for his
perspective on NetApp's latest innovations, which are giving
engineering customers a competitive edge. In a separate podcast
titled "How NetApp Data ONTAP GX Simplifies Capacity and
Performance Growth," Bruce Moxon, vice president of Strategic
Technology at NetApp, discusses how enterprises can run their most
demanding applications using a scale-out storage architecture that
provides nondisruptive upgrades and transparent data
migrations.
Pricing and Availability
All customer pricing for products described in this press release
is available from NetApp sales or reseller partners. All new
products and support are available immediately. To learn more about
how NetApp is helping customers transform their engineering data
centers and high-performance computing environments, please visit
http://www.netapp.com/us/company/leadership/data-center-transformation/.
About NetApp
NetApp creates innovative storage and data management solutions
that accelerate business breakthroughs and deliver outstanding cost
efficiency. Discover our passion for helping companies around the
world go further, faster at www.netapp.com.
Press Contact:
Roger Villareal
NetApp
(408) 822-1959
rogerv@netapp.com