News

As one of NetApp’s top accredited partners we’re in the privileged position of getting the latest insight into the product roadmap and new technology releases. You’ll have seen in one of our recent blog posts we shared some insight on the NetApp-VMware-Cisco Flexpod solution and its relevance to growing oil and gas companies.

This month we wanted to provide an update on NetApp’s new FAS2200 series storage array following an opportunity we had to evaluate it and put through its paces at a NetApp community event. It builds on the success of its predecessors, the FAS2020 and FAS2040, and is an excellent midsized system capable of meeting a number of common challenges.

For anyone who’s not familiar with NetApp, the technology is underpinned by a robust operating system called ONTAP which, with its 12 year heritage, has all of the reliability characteristics oil and gas companies will be looking for when managing and protecting their data. It’s also where the “magic happens” – It’s ONTAP that includes all of those helpful features like snapshots, tiered storage and failback that really remove the headache from managing your data. What we really like about NetApp and ONTAP though is that its a common operating system across the entire range and, thanks to NetApp’s building block approach, as your company grows you can simply add more capacity and scale the system simply and easily.

So what’s so special about the new FAS2200 family? Well firstly it’s running the newest version of ONTAP – 8.1.1 which provides improved levels of storage efficiency. What that means to you and I is a host of new and useful functionality including multi-tenancy, which is helpful if deployed in a cloud scenario where multiple systems may need to be hosted on a single system, greater support for the growing number of data protocols (including CIFS, NFS and iSCSI which, incidentally, carry no additional cost) and dual controllers, making for a box that’s highly resilient due to this level of redundancy. We’re excited by some other stand out features too. Flash Pools in particular which enables up to six extra fast SSD hard drives to be combined into a SAS or SATA storage aggregate, dramatically improving read and write operations and decreases latency for example. If you’ve used NetApp before, this builds on the previous Flash Cache technology which improved only read operations.

There’s no escaping that this updated family is chock full of new technology and helpful enhancements. Thankfully all the “bling” is not at the expense of performance. NetApp claim that the FAS2200 series is 3-7 times faster than its predecessor the 2040 series due to trickle down technology used in the larger enterprise class FAS3000 and FAS6000 series products.

Finally management is provided by the new Netapp System Manager 2.1.1 console which incorporates new features for VMware integration, SnapMirror management and Infinite Volumes. Handily, System Manager will also work with other consoles you may already be using from VMware for instance to enable single pane of glass management across your environment using those vendors’ management consoles.

We think this solution is potentially a great fit for start-up to mid-sized oil and gas companies providing a proven and reliable unified storage environment. The FAS2220 for example is scalable to 432TB and would be ideal for a company with 10-15 virtual machines, CIFS shares and an Exchange server running on iSCSI volumes. Alternatively, for larger businesses the family can just as easily be deployed as a series of multiple arrays in a highly-scalable and resistant cluster or used as a disaster recovery solution or remote office storage. The starting price is less than £4000 too so as an economic step into unified storage or to meet discrete storage challenges across your company it’s a very viable and affordable solution.

If you’d like to hear more about this new box, see it in action or have a wider discussion about your storage needs, please give me a call on 020 7313 9900.