primary storage by both innovating and acquiring technologies that have allowed them to become the leader
in data management solutions.
Today, we see one of the best packaged and most attractive launches I’ve seen in nearly two decades
working with NetApp. There’s no doubt about it, NetApp are finally taking the gloves off to maintain their
dominance in the Primary Storage market.
What’s been announced?
⭐️ AFF C-Series Arrays - the perfect balance of performance and cost
⭐️ AFF A150 Array - 40% higher performance than C190
⭐️ NetApp Advance - simplify upgrades and embrace hybrid flexibility
⭐️ BlueXP #Sustainability Dashboard preview - understand and optimize your carbon footprint
What’s driving this launch?
There are two major shifts taking place in the market right now.
1. Budgets are tightening - Now more than ever customers are looking carefully at the large capex decisions
they must make, extending those decision windows, and figuring out if there are ways to go for low-cost
solutions without compromising on performance and availability.
2. Sustainability - With rising energy costs, sustainability has become a strategic imperative
that is also affecting buying decisions.
1. Enabling customers to transform from hybrid to all-flash arrays without compromise.
2. Improving the ownership experience through life-cycle management.
3. Improving sustainability.
NetApp AFF C-Series and AFF A150
Accelerate your all-flash transformation with zero compromise
Whilst hybrid arrays still offer 5-10ms latency performance, they can suffer from occasional spikes, due to using spinning media, which can cause performance to suffer. Furthermore, hybrid arrays do not offer the same storage efficiencies or Storage Efficiency Guarantees as NetApp's All Flash Arrays.
The NetApp AFF C-Series is NetApp’s newest family of all-flash, high-capacity flash storage systems.
Utilising the latest QLC NVMe SSDs, the C-Series balances affordability, energy efficiency, and carbon footprint reductions to bring you the speed of flash with the affordability of hybrid storage, meaning you get the best price vs performance of any All Flash System on the market making the C-Series an attractive value proposition, whilst still maintaining NetApp’s value proposition around efficiencies, scalability, security, and the ability to be cloud connected.
- AFF C250 - More demanding workloads requiring moderately high performance and high capacity
- AFF C400 - Most enterprise applications that require best balance of performance and capacity
- AFF C800 - Mid-size business and enterprises that require simplicity and best value
Note: The lowest capacity QLC NVME drive commercially available is 15.3TB, so the smallest system available would be around 500TB (5:1 storage efficiency).
A full list of specs can be found here: NetApp C Series: Capacity Flash & Aff C-Series | NetApp
This is due to NetApp turning off TSSE (temperature sensitive storage efficiencies) by default, which results in a higher compression algorithm that is used earlier on cold data without affecting performance.
With an effective storage efficiency ratio of 5:1, the efficiency of the C-Series arrays is comparable with Pure storage, and even with a storage efficiency guarantee (SEG) of 4:1, NetApp will deliver the same effective capacity as Pure at 5:1 (taking in to count the raw to usable conversion and data reduction on top).
Note: SEG is heavily caveated, and your mileage may vary.
The C-Series family comes with the industry’s most comprehensive software suite, NetApp ONTAP One, and unlike previous ONTAP bundles, ONTAP One is an all-inclusive licensing bundle of all their available data services. This
means you’ll no longer have to purchase additional licences to unlock features.
The C-Series is born feature-rich, with all protocols, efficiency technologies, industry-leading anti-ransomware detection and recovery features, proven data protection, and multitenancy and scale available from day one, making this the most attractive value proposition of any NetApp storage array series ever.
C-Series systems will save you up to 98% in rack space and reduce power and cooling costs up to 97% compared to HDD storage.
As with all previous NetApp All Flash Arrays the C-Series is efficient, offering 80% raw-to-usable data efficiency, making it the best in the industry. Running ONTAP 9.12.1P1, storage efficiencies are greatly improved on the C-Series. This is mainly due to TSSE (temperature sensitive storage efficiencies) being turned off by default, which results in a higher compression algorithm that is used earlier on cold data without affecting performance.
With an effective storage efficiency ratio of 5:1, the efficiency of the C-Series arrays is comparable with Pure storage, and even with a storage efficiency guarantee (SEG) of 4:1, NetApp will deliver the same effective capacity as Pure at 5:1 (taking in to count the raw to usable conversion and data reduction on top).
NetApp offers a guaranteed storage efficiency of 4:1 for SAN workloads and 1:5:1 for NAS workloads on AFF systems, so you get high performance while minimizing energy usage, greenhouse gas emissions, and energy costs.
The C-series is feature rich when it comes to security and includes over 30 advanced data security features.
The C-Series offers the ultimate in scalability and management of any All-Flash Array that only NetApp can provide.
Eliminate storage silos and scale capacity non-disruptively by clustering up to 24 nodes in a single cluster.
Mix and match with other storage arrays in NetApp portfolio such as, AFF A-Series or FAS, allowing you to benefit from granular workload mobility by moving volumes between arrays and tiers non-disruptively at the click of a button.
Cloud Connectivity
NetApp has been delivering a better hybrid multi-cloud experience than other vendors for several years now, and the C-Series continues that experience with a full suite of SaaS offerings unmatched in the industry., such as CVO, which runs the same version of ONTAP in the cloud as on-prem.
Hardware Refreshes
The C-Series family is ideal for transitioning from hybrid/HDD storage to all flash and represents a tremendous improvement in speed, density (x10 increase in density of 1.8TB SAS drives) and efficiency over hybrid flash and offers a much better TCO.
Running non–latency-sensitive workloads
For environments running non–latency-sensitive tier 1 workloads that require a 2-4ms latency, such as VMware, (SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server) database applications, and file environments the C-series offers more than enough
performance to meet your needs.
Additionally, for environments where capacity is the primary driver, the C-Series offers better speed, density and efficiency than a hybrid array, so is also ideal serving as a secondary storage target for disaster recovery, backup, or tiering; SSDs won’t match $ for GB of 7.2K HDDs, however it still fits a sweet spot in terms of speed of recovery and TCO.
Whatever your requirement, the C-Series offers the best TCO of any All-Flash Array.
New Look Bezel
It’s been almost a decade since NetApp released any hardware with a new bezel.
NetApp has gone all “flash” with this new modern look to make it stand out within “showroom” data centres.
The NetApp AFF A-Series delivers the high performance you need for business-critical applications with sub-ms latency.
When the AFF A220 became end of life, if left a gap in the portfolio. With this in mind, NetApp have expanded this series with the NetApp AFF A150. This is a refreshed version of the AFF C190 system, but with 20% to 40% higher performance.
It features more scalability and expansion options, and continuous availability across sites, with support for NetApp MetroCluster IP.
The AFF A150 makes an excellent entry-level performance flash option.
NetApp Advance
Unlike NetApp Keystone, which is a consumption based StaaS model, NetApp Advance supports the ongoing upgrade of a material asset acquired through a CAPEX purchase over a defined time period.
The model simplifies and improves the ownership experience by providing a subscription to ongoing hardware innovations through controller upgrades, and/or upgrades to cloud storage if/when ready.
NetApp Advance will initially consist of three programs available with NetApp's AFF and FAS systems, of which, will be added to with more programs and guarantees in the future.
You can read more here NetApp Advance: Invest in storage infrastructure that evolves with you.
NetApp’s Storage Lifecycle Program is an optional chargeable offering that helps customers make the smart choice today, and future-proof their investment for tomorrow by eliminating painful and costly refreshes.
The Storage Lifecycle is applicable to all new NetApp AFF and FAS systems and offers the following advantages:
- Receive in-place technology refreshes of the latest hardware controllers and storage capacity every 3 - 5 years while a subscription agreement is in place; NetApp provides the option for customers to consolidate capacity to larger devices and will provide full credit for any existing capacity.
- Supported managed software updates.
- Premier level support services.
Cloud Advantage
Cloud Advantage leverages the cloud to meet changing business needs over time and enables future growth to the cloud to meet business demands.
Therefore, if/when you get to the end of your refresh cycle and decide to not upgrade your controllers, then you can swap your on-premises controller refresh for offerings that may include cloud service or Keystone StaaS. This gives you the flexibility to purchase the on-prem storage you need today and shift your investment towards the cloud in the future.
I've not seen this kind of flexibility from any other vendor, as they don’t have the deep integrations that NetApp do in the public cloud.
Storage Efficiency Guarantee (SEG)
NetApp’s storage efficiency guarantee is the simplest and most effective guarantee in the industry to get high efficiency, plus high performance with no trade-offs.
The SEG is a risk-free approach to more storage, more value, and more efficiency. If NetApp doesn't meet your workload efficiency goals, then they’ll make it right, at no additional cost to you.
Note: SEG Applies to AFF systems only, including the new C-Series and is heavily caveated, therefore your mileage may vary.
Sustainability Innovation
Energy saving and sustainability remains an important criterion in customer purchase decisions. NetApp are very conscious of this and joined the MIT Product Attribute to Impact Algorithm (PAIA consortium in December 2021. This means they can estimate carbon emissions for hardware and produce reports for AFF and FAS systems.
Further to this NetApp are constantly innovating to reduce their carbon footprint and Softcat can now provide recommended solutions based on sustainability data as opposed to capacity, performance, and cost.
Sustainability Dashboard (sneak peek)
Coming to BlueXP this summer is a new sustainability dashboard that aims to help customers understand and improve their carbon footprint.
A sustainability score will make it easy to assess current stature and track progress towards goals, as well as create actionable insights to help customers improve their energy consumption and reduce their carbon footprint and produce system-level detailed reports and planning.
The sustainability dashboard in BlueXP will include:
- Sustainability score provides insightful assessment
- Project monthly power, carbon, and heat usage
- Recommend actions to improve sustainability score
- Detailed metrics for all your NetApp assests
Summary
- New AFF C-Series brings QLC-based product family to provide customers with lower-cost all-flash storage for Tier 1.5 and Tier 2 workloads.
- NetApp Advance gives customers a set of programs and guarantees to give them confidence in buying from NetApp; buying from NetApp is a no-regret decision.
- Energy saving and sustainability remains an important criterion in customer purchase decisions:
- Sustainability dashboard to help customers understand and improve their IT carbon footprint.
- Sustainability score will make it easy to assess current state and track progress towards goals.
Both the AFF C-Series and AFF A150 will be available starting in March 2023.
NetApp has the only portfolio on the market with the same unified data management system (NetApp ONTAP) across their portfolio, whether it's on-premises or in the cloud.
ONTAP delivers operational simplicity, multi-protocol workloads, non-disruptive mobility and operations, industry-leading protection and security for your data, and integrates direct tiering to cold object storage on premises or in the cloud.
ONTAP is also available on all major public cloud providers allowing you to easily migrate workloads wherever you need them the most.
Author
David Brown - Softcat Solutions Architect and member of the NetApp A-Team