Midsized Market Gets ‘Big On Features’ Storage Solutions

NetApp has introduced an entry-level product portfolio; the FAS2220; which targets the small-medium business (SMB) segment and builds upon the momentum and success of the FAS2240.

It utilises new NetApp Flash Pool technology which extends NetApp’s Virtual Storage Tier approach to the midsized market. This enables customers to accelerate application performance that are simple to implement out-of-the-box. The technology is basically a storage-level RAID-protected SSD-based cache while Flash Cache is based on controller-level PCIe flash cards. The addition of Flash Pool technology is a broader usage especially for mission-critical applications because of sustained performance even after a failover and improved performance for write-intensive workloads.

This technology comes with the latest version of NetApp’s Data ONTAP 8.1.1 operating system that aims to provide a truly unified, scalable architecture that enables customers to easily and affordably upgrade to higher-end systems without having to rip-and-replace. It provides cluster-ready capabilities, a boon for midsize customers who want to seamlessly add storage capacity as needed without any downtime.

Another noteworthy feature about Data ONTAP 8.1.1 is Data ONTAP EDGE, a license-based service that provides the flexibility and efficiency of Data ONTAP for remote storage requirements up to 5 terabytes (TB). It is built upon Data ONTAP-v and is meant to be installed in a virtual machine.

Data ONTAP EDGE extends NetApp data protection to remote offices by integrating backup and restore software, as well as other storage efficiency features.