NetApp today announced the availability of its new all-flash EF540 array, intended for performance-driven application and data center deployments. The EF540, built on the SANtricity operating system, can provide more than 300,000 IOPS and sub-millisecond latency in a highly available, fault-tolerant architecture. The company has also released a preview architecture for its new FlashRay product family, which NetApp has built to maximize scale-out and storage efficiency for all-flash arrays.
NetApp today announced the availability of its new all-flash EF540 array, intended for performance-driven application and data center deployments. The EF540, built on the SANtricity operating system, can provide more than 300,000 IOPS and sub-millisecond latency in a highly available, fault-tolerant architecture. The company has also released a preview architecture for its new FlashRay product family, which NetApp has built to maximize scale-out and storage efficiency for all-flash arrays.
The new EF540 brings increased credibility into the flash array marketplace that’s dominated by startups filling a void that’s been left by the major storage vendors. While many have offered flash in the past, NetApp for its part has sold over 36PB of flash to accelerate 3 exabytes of disk-based storage, in most cases all-flash arrays have been shoehorned into existing hard drive offerings or used only as a cache. The new EF540 combines enterprise-grade high availability with consistent predictable performance, ease of management and a global support network, while being purpose made for applications that can make use of a dedicated flash array storage tier.
NetApp FlashRay
The FlashRay product line will emphasize consistent low-latency performance, high availability, and integrated data protection. Being engineered from the ground up for flash memory, the FlashRay architecture is optimized for maximum flash life and uses a cluster architecture that natively supports automatic balancing. FlashRay also leverages efficiency features such as global inline, variable-length deduplication and compression and scales out so customers can start with a small deployment and grow capacity and performance as needed. Other highlights include snapshots, replication/backup to FlashRay and ONTAP, object granular data management, multi-protocol access and application integration.
Availability
The NetApp EF540 flash array is now available. FlashRay will be available in limited beta mid-2013, with general availability in 2014.
