Tag Archives: disk

NetApp Enterprise Storage Announcements – February 2025

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NetApp recently made some announcements about enhancements to its enterprise storage line of products. I thought I’d share a few notes here.

 

ASA A-Series

If you’re unfamiliar with the ASA line of devices, it’s NetApp’s all-flash SAN solution. There are a few models already available (see the data sheet here) and now there are three more A-series models: the ASA A50, ASA A30, and ASA A20.

[image courtesy of NetApp]

Major Hardware Innovations

There’s an integrated compression offload engine with Intel® QAT®1 (this is not available with the ASA A20), delivering the following benefits:

  • Next generation CPU architecture provides increased performance for resource-intensive tasks and processing
  • Always-on enhanced storage efficiency without impacting performance
  • Up to 160Gb/s data compression

It takes advantage of PCIe Gen 5, as well as DDR 5 Memory. According to NetApp, this delivers twice the clock speed for faster memory access and 50% more throughput for large data transfers. Additionally, there’s support for 64Gb Fibre Channel and NVMe/FC, as well as 100GbE and NVMe/TCP support. They use Titanium power supplies with a 95% efficiency rating.

Storage efficiency

You also get access to “always on, inline, data reduction”. There’s no cold data policy to manage, nothing for customers to configure and, according to NetApp, it’s easy to meet Storage Efficiency Guarantee ratios. Thanks to QAT, you’ll never need to choose between performance or efficiency.

 

New FAS and EF-Series systems

FAS50

The FAS50 delivers quite a punch in a small 2U form factor, with:

  • Optimised I/O flexibility;
  • Improved price/performance value;
  • Enabled for future security hardware offload; and
  • Released with ONTAP 9.16.1 GA.

[image courtesy of NetApp]

EF Series

NetApp has also announced the availability of new EF-Series arrays – the EF300C and EF600C.

[image courtesy of NetApp]

A few things to note with the EF300C and EF600C:

  • The default configuration is a single Dynamic Disk Pool (DDP) which is automatically created using all available drives for simplicity in management
  • There is support for 30TB or 60TB capacities (but by default there is no mixing of capacities in a shelf)
  • There is only support for QLC NVMe SSDs (No mixing of QLC or TLC NVMe SSDs allowed)
  • Available with a minimum of 12x up to a maximum of 24x QLC NVMe SSDs (No expansion shelf capability)

 

Thoughts

It’s been a minute since I wrote about a storage company’s product announcement. The news from NetApp piqued my interest, however, as it seems like the portfolio of products and options has developed into something broader than what NetApp was traditionally known for (and I know there’s even more news that was announced that I haven’t covered here). Whilst I talk a lot about how useful the cloud is in my day job, it’s hard to dispute that I/O (and storage in general) can still have a massive impact on the performance and usability of critical and not so critical applications alike. Additionally, having options in terms of scalability, performance, and transport mechanisms, is key to delivering the right storage platforms to the applications (and end users) that need them. But while I’ve dumped a lot of speeds and feeds into this article, ultimately the success of a storage company like NetApp is more about how the platforms can be managed, integrated with other systems, and upgraded from one version to the next.

If you’re running everything in one of the hyperscalers (or more than one, for that matter). you’re not going to be terribly interested in what NetApp is selling. Despite the fact that NetApp is doing some cool stuff with hyperscalers as well (that I’ll cover in a separate post). But a large percentage of the world’s critical workloads are still hosted on what we might term “traditional” storage appliances hosted in data centres across the globe and accessed and managed in a similar fashion to the way they were 5 or 10 years ago. But that doesn’t mean that companies like NetApp aren’t innovating. Indeed, looking at some of the specs and numbers being touted here, it’s easy to see why companies are sticking with the likes of NetApp when it comes to hosting enterprise workloads on enterprise storage. I don’t think the end of traditional storage is here by any stretch, and I’m pretty sure there’s more innovation to come.

Spectra Logic – BlackPearl Overview

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I recently had the opportunity to take a briefing with Jeff Braunstein and Susan Merriman from Spectra Logic (one of those rare occasions where getting your badge scanned at a conference proves valuable), and thought I’d share some of my notes here.

 

BlackPearl Family

Spectra Logic sell a variety of products, but this briefing was focused primarily on the BlackPearl series. Braunstein described it as a “gateway” device, with both NAS and object front end interfaces, and backend capability that can move data to multiple types of archives.

[image courtesy of Spectra Logic]

It’s a hardware box, but at its core the value is in the software product. The idea is that the BlackPearl acts as a disk cache, and you configure policies to send the data to one or more storage targets. The cool thing is that it supports multiple retention policies, and these can be permanent too. By that I mean you could spool one copy to tape for long term storage, and have another copy of your data sit on disk for 90 days (or however long you wanted).

 

Local vs Remote Storage

Local

There are a few different options for local storage, including BlackPearl Object Storage Disk, functioning as “near line archive”. This is configured with 107 enterprise quality SATA drives, (and they’re looking at introducing 16TB drives next month), providing roughly 1.8PB RAW capacity. They function as power-down archive drives (using the drive spin down settings), and delivers a level of resilience and reliability by using ZFS as the file system,. There are also customer-configurable parity settings. Alternatively, you can pump data to Spectra Tape Libraries, for those of you who still want to use tape as a storage format.

 

Remote Storage Targets

In terms of remote storage targets, BlackPearl can leverage either public cloud, or other BlackPearl devices as replication targets. Replication to BlackPearl can be one way or bi-directional. Public Cloud support is available via Amazon S3 (and S3-like products such as Cloudian and Wasabi), and MS Azure. There is a concept of data immutability in the product, and you can turn on versioning to prevent your data management applications (or users) from accidentally clobbering your data.

Braunstein also pointed out that tape generations evolve, and BlackPearl has auto-migration capabilities. You can potentially have data migrate transparently from tape to tape (think LTO-6 to LTO-7), tape to disk, and tape to cloud.

 

[image courtesy of Spectra Logic]

In terms of how you leverage BlackPearl, some of that is dependent on the workflows you have in place to move your data. This could be manual, semi-automated, or automated (or potentially purpose built into existing applications). There’s a Spectra S3 RESTful API, and there’s heaps of information on developer.spectralogic.com on how to integrate BlackPearl into your existing applications and media workflows.

 

Thoughts

If you’re listening to the next-generation data protection vendors and big box storage folks, you’d wonder why companies such as Spectra Logic still focus on tape. It’s not because they have a rich heritage and deep experience in the tape market (although they do). There are plenty of use cases where tape still makes sense in terms of its ability to economically store large amounts of data in a relatively secure (off-line if required) fashion. Walk into any reasonably sized film production house and you’ll still see tape in play. From a density perspective (and durability), there’s a lot to like about tape. But BlackPearl is also pretty adept at getting data from workflows that were traditionally file-based and putting them on public cloud environments (the kind of environments that heavily leverage object storage interfaces). Sure, you can pump the data up to AWS yourself if you’re so inclined, but the real benefit of the BlackPearl approach, in my opinion, is that it’s policy-driven and fully automated. There’s less chance that you’ll fat finger the transfer of critical data to another location. This gives you the ability to focus on your core business, and not have to worry about data management.

I’ve barely scratched the surface of what BlackPearl can do, and I recommend checking out their product site for more information.