NetApp Expands Flash Portfolio, Extending Leadership in Enterprise Flash Storage

SUNNYVALE, CA--(Marketwire - Feb 19, 2013) - In a move that extends its leadership in the industry, NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) today announced the availability of the EF540 all-flash array for today's extreme performance-driven enterprise applications, and previewed the architecture of its new, purpose-built FlashRay™ product family, which will deliver rich scale-out and storage efficiency features to maximize the benefits of all-flash arrays. The new product introductions extend the comprehensive NetApp® enterprise flash portfolio, which maximizes the value of flash across the entire compute, network and storage stack, enabling the flexibility to choose the best approach to unique workloads.

With the strongest and broadest flash portfolio in the industry, in a complete line of products, including intelligent caching technologies Flash Cache™, Flash Pool™, and Flash Accel™, the new EF540 flash array and the forthcoming FlashRay family provide flexibility and choice and maximize the value of flash across the entire compute, network, and storage stack. NetApp has deployed more than 36PB of flash in the market to date. These new product introductions will further extend that leadership.

"Flash changes everything by transforming the speed of business," said Manish Goel, executive vice president, Product Operations, NetApp. "However, enterprise imperatives for global scale, efficiency, and reliability remain the same. NetApp's approach to flash removes the compromise from consideration, offering customers the best of all worlds."

Watch Brendon Howe, vice president, Product and Solutions Marketing, talk about NetApp's comprehensive flash storage strategy and how customers can take advantage of it.

NetApp EF540 Flash Array Heads to the Top of the Enterprise-Class

The EF540, built on the proven SANtricity® operating system, is the industry's first flash array to combine consistent extreme performance with enterprise-class high availability, reliability, manageability, and worldwide support. Designed for performance-driven applications, the EF540 delivers over 300,000 IOPS and submillisecond data access in a highly available, fault-tolerant architecture. It can eliminate storage over-provisioning and dramatically reduces costs by cutting space utilization, power, and cooling. Business-critical database applications can run up to 500% faster than in traditional storage environments, delivering instant response times and enterprise-class reliability.

The EF540 features intuitive storage management and advanced tuning functions, enabling efficient management with minimal effort. The storage system maximizes application value and has a fully redundant architecture designed to eliminate downtime.

NetApp FlashRay Family Defines the Future of Flash Storage

With the introduction of the FlashRay family, NetApp is extending its storage and data management leadership by developing a new, purpose-built all-flash storage architecture. The FlashRay™ product architecture is founded on rich scale-out and efficiency capabilities to maximize the benefits of flash arrays. The new product line will combine consistent, low-latency performance, high availability, and integrated data protection with enterprise storage efficiency features such as inline deduplication and compression.

FlashRay will be available in limited beta in the middle of 2013 and will be generally available in 2014. The product line is designed from the ground up to maximize the value of flash. FlashRay continues to execute against a strategy to deliver an intelligent and integrated architecture that is optimized for flash.

Today, NetApp also announced the release of three new platforms within its FAS6200 storage systems family. The FAS6220, FAS6250, and FAS6290 increase the performance and value of its high-end product line for the most stringent workloads.

Availability

The NetApp EF540 flash array is available today. The FlashRay product line will be generally available early in 2014.

Supporting Quotes:

Industry Analyst Quote

• Jeff Janukowicz, research director, Solid State Storage and Enabling Technologies, IDC
  
  "A new class of arrays is unlocking flash's full potential and delivering capabilities that accelerate the performance, reliability, and efficiency of enterprise data centers. For all-flash arrays to gain broader market adoption, it is important to look beyond the performance improvements and deliver must-have reliability, availability, and supportability features. The continued growth of NetApp flash storage systems, underscores the value of the company's approach to managing and storing the massive amounts of data being created today."
  

Customer Quotes

• Kirk Larson, Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Children's Hospital Central California
  
  "NetApp's all-flash array offering would help us improve the user-experience for high-performance workloads. Currently, we are experiencing 25% annual data growth using NetApp's Virtual Storage Tier; this combines NetApp efficiency technologies with Flash Cache intelligent caching to prioritize I/O data requests. Hospital staff members can access the right data at the right time, while IT can deliver a more dynamic and cost-effective infrastructure."
  
  
• Bradley Lauritson, Director of Upstream Technology, Apache Corporation
  
  "The NetApp storage solution -- in particular, their flash solutions -- means we can take full advantage of our new software environment for enhanced decision making, unhampered by data transfer delays. Apache can make more accurate and profitable drilling decisions with the NetApp storage as our IT foundation."

Additional Resources

• Learn more about NetApp's expanded flash storage portfolio with key benefits and use cases
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About NetApp
NetApp creates innovative storage and data management solutions that deliver outstanding cost efficiency and accelerate business breakthroughs. Our commitment to living our core values and consistently being recognized as a great place to work around the world are fundamental to our long-term growth and success, as well as the success of our pathway partners and customers. Use of the word "partner" or "partnership" does not imply a legal partnership between NetApp and any other company. Discover our passion for helping companies around the world go further, faster at www.netapp.com.

NetApp, the NetApp logo, Go further, faster, Flash Accel, Flash Cache, Flash Pool, FlashRay, and SANtricity are trademarks or registered trademarks of NetApp, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. All other brands or products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders and should be treated as such.