NetApp cooks up meatier low-end NAS appliance
FAS200 line goes down low
SaaS data loss: The problem you didn’t know you had
NetApp today announced fresh NAS kit and software as it throws itself into a low-end scrap with EMC and HP.
Similar to NetApp's FAS200 product line, the new FAS2000 series is designed as a low-to-mid-end storage appliance, but still sports some high end features and protocols. The boxes can work either as a classic NAS (network attached storage) device or in a SAN (storage area network), as they support iSCSI and Fibre Channel.
The FAS2000 line comes in two varieties; the FAS2050 and the FAS2020. The slighter FAS2020 supports 24TB of storage capacity, 40 disk drives and 2GB memory. Step up in the line and the FAS2050 will hold up to 69TB, 104 disk drives and 4GB memory. You'll also get 2 PCIe expansion slots out of it.
To make better use of your TBs, the boxes also offer thin provisioning, cloning, RAID 6 and de-dupe software.
NetApp sees the FAS2020 being the logical replacement for the current FAS270 system. The FAS2050 bridges the a gap before entering FAS3000 series territory.
The systems start at $12,000 and $25,000 receptively. They're generally available now, although NetApp admitted they've been shipping for close to a month under non-disclosure.
Like the rest of NetApp's FAS gear, the 2000s arrive as a multiprotocol box, supporting CIFS, NFS, HTTP, FTP, TFTP, and as previously mentioned, iSCSI and Fibre Channel protocols.
IBM will resell the FAS2000 systems as the rebranded IBM N3000 systems.
New services
In addition to the gear, NetApp has two new services in the pipes, offered by NetApp Global Services and the NetApp Service Partner Network.
For new customers, there's the a new Rapid Deployment Service, designed to configure new systems. They'll come in to make sure Snapshot capabilities are fully integrated with applications, such as Exchange, Oracle and SQL Server.
Once up and running, there's a Storage Availability Audit service. The retroactive audit makes sure customers are making use of the availability features built into the systems. ®
COMMENTS
NetApp RAID levels
The article is slightly misleading about the RAID levels that NetApp use - to their disfavour.
The original NetApp protection was RAID 4 - all the parity is written to one dedicated disk per RAID set. This wasn't a problem with one disk being "hot" since unlike most RAID 4 or 5 implementations, there is only one write per disk; parity being calculated in memory, not by calculating the parity from reading what has already been written and then rewriting this to the parity disk (standard RAID4) or over the whole RAID set (RAID 5).
What the article claims as RAID 6 (double parity disks) is wrong. NetApp uses their own form of RAID 4 with a second dedicated disk for the "diagonal" parity. Standard RAID6 however spreads both of the parity stripes across the whole set. NetApp use two dedicated disks for their "double" parity and again, the number of read / calculate parity / write operations are drastically reduced as compared to other hardware RAID - all the fancy work is built into the kernel of the operating system.
Not that I work for NetApp you understand, (wouldn't mind though).
Owen Gardiner
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