BLOG: NetApp ASA SAN Storage Series for Efficient Data Management

May 23rd, 2023 BLOG: NetApp ASA SAN Storage Series for Efficient Data Management
Seth Tollefson
Solutions Architect

 

On May 16th, 2023, NetApp made significant announcements around its new ASA SAN Storage product, a high-performance, secure, scalable family of SAN storage systems designed for mission-critical workloads and applications. In conjunction with the announcement for this new ASA series of storage arrays, NetApp also announced updates for the Six Nines (99.9999%) Data Availability Guarantee, NetApp Ransomware Recovery Guarantee, ONTAP One, and StorageGRID.

 

New ASA Family of Systems

 

The newly announced ASA A-Series line of storage arrays boasts a maximum effective capacity of 351PB with a 5:1 storage efficiency ratio while being designed for customers from small and mid-sized businesses up to large enterprise customers with the most demanding performance-driven mission-critical applications and capacity requirements for their data center storage environments.

The NetApp ASA A-Series offers a non-disruptive scale-out design that allows for investment protection and growth. That design, along with their Storage Efficiency Guarantee, makes the A-Series an attractive option for customers with unpredictable data growth or those that need to consolidate to a storage platform with minimal rack, power, and cooling requirements.

The entry-level ASA 150, targeted for small and mid-sized business requirements, can start as small as a single 2U storage array with a 300W power draw and then scale with growing demand. The flagship ASA A900, targeted for enterprise-class mission-critical workloads, can scale to over 350PB of effective capacity while delivering the low-latency data access required from the most demanding block-based SAN workloads.

 

[Image Source: https://www.netapp.com/data-storage/all-flash-san-storage-array/ ]

[The superscripts reference this copy.]

1 Effective capacity based on 5:1 storage efficiency ratios with the maximum number of SSDs installed; space savings vary dependent on workload and use cases.

2 Estimate under typical conditions.

 

NetApp Six Nines Guarantee

 

NetApp is so confident that the ASA systems are architected for mission-critical workloads that the company is backing the systems with an industry-leading Six Nines (99.9999%) Data Availability Guarantee when customers follow best practices that are validated by NetApp Cloud Insights.

When making decisions with your critical data, it is imperative that you have confidence in the storage system that services that data. According to IDC, NetApp has provided this peace of mind for their customers in the past by showing remarkable system availability with over 100,000 controller pairs running ONTAP 9, providing a minimum of 99.9999% availability.

NetApp will guarantee this peace of mind with newly purchased ASA A-Series systems. If the NetApp ASA A-Series systems do not meet this stated performance level, NetApp will provide remediation under certain terms and conditions.

 

NetApp Ransomware Recovery Guarantee

 

Along with the Six Nines Data Availability Guarantee, NetApp will guarantee the ability to recover your Snapshot data on your primary or secondary ONTAP storage systems with NetApp’s Ransomware Protection and Recovery Service. In the unlikely event that you are not able to recover the Snapshot copies, NetApp will offer you compensation.

NetApp’s SnapLock Compliance feature is built into ONTAP, which acts as a logical air gap, prohibiting modification or deletion of data stored in the enabled volume. This feature provides disaster recovery capabilities by protecting the data stored in that volume from external threats, such as ransomware attacks, and the deletion of the data by an attacker in possession of compromised administrative credentials for the NetApp arrays.

The data can be protected on the primary storage system, with failover to a secondary storage system using NetApp SnapMirror’s incremental-forever replication, or both.

 

ONTAP One

 

NetApp has announced that ONTAP One is now included on every AFF (A-Series and C-Series), All-SAN Array (ASA), and FAS. This updated announcement covers all ONTAP systems currently being sold, as well as all their customers with these existing arrays that are under support.

 

What is ONTAP One?

 

ONTAP One now offers an easy-to-consume software licensing scheme that includes all the core multiprotocol licenses for your ONTAP systems, as well as integrated autonomous ransomware protection, replication via SnapMirror and SnapMirror S3, and application-integrated data protection snapshots facilitated by SnapCenter.

This all-in-one license scheme can greatly simplify your procurement of these NetApp ONTAP-based storage arrays. The single line item reduces the complexity of the BOMs by providing all the features that ONTAP offers without worrying about any excessive licensing barriers.

 

 

StorageGRID

 

NetApp also announced the availability of NetApp StorageGRID 11.7 and the StorageGRID SGF6112 appliance.

The main feature that NetApp has announced with this StorageGRID 11.7 release is the advanced grid federation that is enabled by cross-grid replication (CGR). This allows for the replication of objects from one geo-distributed grid to a physically separate grid. CGR allows for bi-directional replication between buckets in an active-active environment, can clone tenant information, and can track objects in the create/modify/delete lifecycle as object versions.

NetApp’s StorageGRID SGF6112 is the newest addition to the StorageGRID platform. This all-flash object storage device was designed to meet the growing needs of customer use cases in environments supporting machine learning, data lakes, AI, and other analytic workloads. The SGF6112 boasts 48 cores at 2.6Ghz and a raw capacity of 183TB, and is front-ended by 4x 10/25GbE interfaces in a 1U form factor.

 

More Information

 

As a NetApp Star partner, Mainline Information Systems delivers enterprise storage solutions that are efficient, reliable, and cost-effective. Our top-level partnership assures clients that we maintain the stringent Star partner certification requirements across the NetApp storage family of products, plus we are backed by a strong relationship with the NetApp team. For more information on how we can help you, contact your Mainline Account Representative directly, or reach out to us here with any questions.

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