NetApp boosts AFF, StorageGrid and E-series hardware with 60TB drives

NetApp has upgraded its AFF A- and C-series flash storage arrays while also boosting capacity and performance in StorageGrid object storage and E-series storage area networks (SANs), mostly as a result of new 60TB arrays plus central processing unit (CPU) and backplane enhancements.

AFF A- and C-series – performance and capacity-oriented respectively – get new-generation CPUs, reworked peripheral component interconnect express (PCIe) connectivity, and are now fully modular to allow component upgrades in place while the chassis remains. With 60TB drives, capacity is now boosted also.

Storage is via the Ontap operating system and can be file, block or object. While that is the case, NetApp also has its ASA block storage array, which it upgraded in September. Dedicated object storage capacity comes in its StorageGrid line, of which more below. AFF arrays come with full cloud connectivity for backup, tiering and migration.

The arrays in the performance-oriented A-series are the A20, A30 and A50. NetApp claims they are now 41%, 96% and 153% quicker than their predecessor products, A150, A250 and A400.

These new arrays replace existing ones at the lower end of the AFF range. They complement the A70, A90 and A1k at the high end that go to nearly 4PB raw and more than 15PB useable in the A1K, with nearly 200PB possible in a cluster configuration.

In the QLC flash-equipped C-series, the new arrays are the C30, C60 and C80. Maximum capacity in the largest of these is nearly doubled over its predecessor, the C800 – from 7.4PB to 14.7PB – while at the other end, the new C30 goes to 2.2PB compared with the older C250, which went to 1.5PB.

Possible capacities in the C-series can go to just over 700PB in a cluster of C80 arrays.

Grant Caley, UK and Ireland solutions director at NetApp, said: “Since the advent of flash storage, the bottleneck of disk performance is no longer the factor for platform refreshes. Now it is about controller performance to that storage. So, capacities aren’t changing significantly, but controller performance is.”

Also, NetApp’s StorageGrid object storage arrays – the offspring of E-series hardware and Bycast object storage software – get an upgrade centred on 60TB arrays with more than 2PB possible in 3U possible in its SGF6112 product. An upgrade to StorageGrid software also allows for workloads in a cluster to be segregated into nodes for data only and metadata, plus 5,000 buckets per tenant possible.

While object storage is possible in NetApp’s Ontap-equipped hardware, StorageGrid targets dedicated object storage use cases.

“Dynamic policy management allows the customer to decide on security, lifecycle, etc, in a much larger platform than object in Ontap, which is aimed at transient storage of object data or where it is managed by an application, such as backup,” said Caley.

E-series SAN arrays

Meanwhile, the company’s E-series SAN arrays – the only ones in the product line that don’t use the Ontap OS – also get 60TB drives and a CPU refresh, to provide two new platforms. These are the E4012 and E4060, which go to 264TB and 1.3PB raw capacity respectively. Those go to 2.1PB and 6.6PB raw with expansion shelves.

E-series hardware is SAN-only, and aimed at customers that want affordable, basic storage capacity. Caley said the E-series target is “simple SAN”.

“It has snapshots and replication but is aimed at video surveillance, backup, archive storage,” he said. “It is for extreme performance or density, not data management, and has Infiniband, so it can be used for HPC storage.”

Besides array hardware upgrades, NetApp also announced a raft of enhancements to the software ecosystem surrounding it. These included Kubernetes data protection in Trident that includes snapshots, backup and restore, disaster recovery, and workload migration, available on-premise and in the cloud.

Trident’s data protection features are now also available where it works with Red Hat’s OpenShift environment, where there are also new collaborations between NetApp and Cisco in FlexPod converged offerings for OpenShift configurations aimed at virtualisation and artificial intelligence.