Not afraid of big Data challenge NetApp to build high-performance e-platform

Large amounts of data and information generated by large data and high-performance applications have been exploding. How the data is stored, managed, analyzed, and protected determines the company's success or failure. Therefore, the company chooses which storage platform or solution as the foundation of IT infrastructure, always plays a decisive role.

For enterprise storage systems, the key to success is platform flexibility. In today's highly competitive environment, only flexible, scalable storage platforms can be scaled for a new generation of business requirements. To handle high-performance applications and data-intensive workflows while meeting the growing data requirements of users, NetApp, the global storage leader, has launched a new e-series platform offering and upgraded E5500. The updated e-series platform lays the groundwork for handling highly available, high-capacity, and optimized application workflows to accommodate critical vertical markets (including healthcare, security, media and Entertainment) and high-performance computing markets (such as oil and gas, manufacturing, and government).

Specifically, the NETAPP e-Series Storage array was formerly the LSI Engenio External storage System business that it acquired in 2011 with 480 million dollars. After that, the NetApp e-series continues to lead innovative trends by leveraging dynamic disk pools, smart cache tiering, NetApp autosupport Tools, ip-based replication capabilities in simple arrays, and the latest release of 12G SAS products. The e-Series is a performance-optimized and block-based NetApp storage product portfolio. The series is designed to be easily scalable and suitable for workloads that require 99.999% reliability and consistent performance.

E2700: Simple and flexible and dramatically improves application performance

NetApp's new Generation E-series platform for today's data-intensive workloads designed for high performance. With NetApp E2700 storage systems, not only are multiple host connectivity options, drive options, and multiple disk rack options, but also seamless integration with virtually any application-driven storage environment, designed to provide simple SAN storage that is the right choice for remote offices and branches.

NETAPP E2700

Because the management of the E2700 system is very simple and flexible, IT staff can devote themselves to the development of value-added products and services without distraction from managing storage. At the same time, simplified design is extremely suitable for a wide range of workloads. IT departments can add storage capacity based on enterprise development requirements without reconfiguring running applications. The introduction of 12G sas,e2700 significantly improves application performance and further improves performance. With fibre optic controller (Fabric Controller, FC), Internet small Computer system interface (Internet Sgt Computer System Interface, iSCSI), Serial Attached scsi (Serial Checkmark SCSI) SAS and InfiniBand SAS support, seamless operation and seamless application integration to meet the requirements of any application environment.

E2700 provides the flexibility of multiple host connectivity interfaces, multiple drive technologies, and disk rack options to seamlessly integrate into virtually any workload environment. This system supports the latest GB/s FC, the ten GB/s iSCSI and the GB/s SAS host connectivity options. With FC and iSCSI interface options, E2700 can seamlessly integrate into existing data centers with established storage networks. The GB/S SAS interface provides high-speed connectivity for high-performance direct-attached storage solutions.

In addition, E2700 can further increase flexibility by mixing various drive types in a single system, helping to achieve overall goals and protecting drive investment. With this flexibility, a hybrid array of solid-state drives and Nl-sas drives has the advantage of high performance and high density storage.

In the most outstanding performance of E Platform, E2700 performance is also quite uncommon. It enhances performance by leveraging intelligent cache tiering technology with SSD caching capabilities to leverage performance-enabled solid-state drives (solid state Drive, SSD) media to store the most frequently accessed blocks of data. With SSD caching, customers do not need any management because caching is data-driven and can be done in real time. Users can define data movement triggers between tiers without having to develop complex policies. SSD caching enhances performance by caching the solid-state disks in the drive tray to speed data access. In addition, each storage system can scale up to 5 TB, ensuring high efficiency.

E5500: Optimize data protection for high performance Escorts

As a representative of high-performance storage systems, NETAPP E5500 can meet demanding performance and capacity requirements without impacting streamlining and efficiency.

Because E5500 is designed to meet a wide range of solution requirements, it is also useful for supporting high IOPS mixed workloads and databases, high-performance file systems, and bandwidth-intensive streaming applications. In addition, it ensures the highest availability, integrity, and security of data by virtue of its fully redundant I/O paths, advanced protection features, and extensive diagnostics.

E5500 with superior performance enhances enterprise data protection with santricity suite data replication capabilities and flexible interface options for 10G iSCSI and 16G FC. With NetApp Autosupport, users have access to enterprise monitoring and customer group analytics capabilities to enable forward-looking operations. Each E5500 system can scale to 1.5PB to meet the needs of data-intensive storage on a large scale. NETAPP E5500 combines high-capacity bandwidth performance, high IOPS, and extremely high storage densities to create systems that are best suited to data-intensive solutions.

It is worth mentioning that E5500 in addition to outstanding performance, but also has a strong data protection capabilities, and all this benefit from DDP technology. NetApp is now applying for patent DDP to significantly simplify traditional RAID management by distributing data parity information and standby capacity across the drive pool, while helping to expand capacity and enhance protection more easily.

Dynamic disk Pool (DDP) is an innovative new technology that can provide enhanced data protection for customers and improve overall performance. DDP manages the dynamic rebuilding of the failed drive, and after a drive failure, the customer can use DDP to restore the storage system to its optimal state, which is eight times times faster than the traditional raid architecture.

Unlike traditional RAID volume groups, which use only a fixed number of drive configurations, dynamic disk pools can optimize this configuration, with a minimum of 11 drives, and up to the maximum number of E5500 systems supported. In addition, while recovering from a drive failure, DDP can help customers reduce their performance impact by nearly 60%. With this enhanced data protection technology, large data customers can ensure business continuity and reduce overall storage system costs.

Unique santricity software simplifies storage management

NetApp has been pioneering and innovating over the years to create new software features that complement the core capabilities of NetApp storage. Santricity software is an important part of the E2700 and E5500 systems.

NETAPP santricity Storage Management software is both powerful and easy to use and attractive. The software also provides a high degree of flexibility for the configuration that the storage administrator loves, with this flexible configuration for optimal performance tuning and full control of the data layout. The dynamic capabilities of the Santricity 11.10 operating system support immediate scaling, reconfiguration, and maintenance without disrupting storage-system I/O.

With the NetApp e-series santricity Remote mirroring feature, users can maintain access to business-critical data during site outages or unplanned outages through proven, efficient disaster recovery solutions. In addition, santricity supports remote replication based on FC and IP, enabling high availability across the park and between cities and even globally. With the flexibility of FC-or IP-based remote mirroring, IT departments can meet the requirements of service-level agreements in any virtual or traditional application environment.

With Santricity software for dedicated infrastructure and clustered data Ontap software for shared virtual infrastructures, NetApp can meet the many storage requirements from dedicated workloads to virtualized data centers.

As a global installation system of more than 500,000 units, China's market midrange storage System best-selling products, NetApp's e-series platform is a time-tested market, its reliability, availability, security is self-evident. In the 2013, NetApp continued to break through and innovate in several major IT key technology areas in flash, cloud computing, software definition storage, and fusion architecture. As of now, the NETAPP E-series platform has developed a product architecture that includes E2600, E2700, E5400, E5500, and EF550, which can be deployed in the world's most demanding data-intensive environments. These dedicated workload environments require sophisticated, multi-functional storage that delivers high performance and scalability without high cost. With SSD cache support, PB-level capacity, and improved data protection, the NETAPP e-series platform will help companies speed innovation and put theory into practice.