Network Appliance says its newest storage system will shove aside EMC and Hewlett-Packard in open enterprise data center systems.
The FAS 6000 family, which includes the top-of-line eight-CPU FAS6070 can handle up to 1,000 hard drives with a total of 500TB and 4Gb Fibre Channel support, is aimed at the largest data centre applications and consolidations.
The initial models also include smaller FAS 6030, which has four processors and scales up to 840 hard drives totallying 420TB.
“NetApp can no longer just be perceived as a NAS (network attached storage) company,” said Jeff Goldstein, the company’s director for Canada.
“We moved into the SAN (storage attached network) space some three years ago. We’re clearly moving into the data centre around the largest SAN applications.”
“We’re in the SAN space, and we’re in the SAN space in a great big way with some very big machines to meet almost anybody’s requirements.”
“We’ve moved way up in our ability to compete with both EMC and Hitachi, and we do it in a much more modular way and with a lot less money.”
In addition to the new family, NetApp also announced new support from host bus adapter and switch manufacturers such as Cisco Systems and Brocade.
“It puts us at a completely new level of scalability,” said Ravi Chalka, NetApp’s director of marketing for storage management, “which basically meets the scalability of frame array today.”
The 6000 line will eventually replace the FAS900 line – Chalka said the eight-CPU 6070 is twice as fast as the FAS980 – but for the time being the 900 models will remain in the lineup.
Chalka wouldn’t be specific on price, saying it depended on configuration. He did say, however, “you won’t pay a whole lot more” for an FAS980. The FAS6070 will be “30 to 40 per cent higher” than that.
Still, he said, the FAS6000 systems will be less expensive than comparable frame array systems. “You don’t need to spend two, three times as much buying frame array-class products just to scale or get high performance,” he said. But he did allow that customers needing a hardened system would go for frame array.
As with all NetApp systems, the FAS6000 line will be sold through the channel as well as by the company’s direct sales force. However, while Goldstein said 52 per cent of NetApp’s sales are done by its VARs, only 25 per cent of enterprise business – which would include the top line – goes through the channel, mainly because big buyers want big discounts.
Partner margin on the new hardware is “about the same,” as the FAS900 line, he said.
With the FAS6000 NetApp is also introducing a Rapid Deployment service from its technical staff, which promises to implement a system for a set price.
Goldstein has large expectations for the new line. Many enterprise customers haven’t bought the FAS980, favouring instead the 960 to give themselves room for expansion. The 6000 “gives them a clear indication that beyond their current 960 there are three more steps, which gives them a lot of headroom and lets them think about how to drive bigger systems.”
Also announced is a new NetApp Manageability Software family four suites of tools with an integrated framework that are targeted at application, server, data, and storage administrators.
The suites are composed of existing and upgraded modules of applications already offered by the company. New apps include SnapManager for Oracle (joining SnapManager for Exchange and SQL Sever, and Operations Manager (formerly called DFM), which has more capabilities. SnapDrive for Unix now supports Linux.
