Network Appliance (NetApp) took the wraps off a third box in its
midrange FAS3000 series today, unveiled new software for managing
disk backups and updated existing products, including SnapManager
for Exchange, SnapManager for Oracle and Virtual File Manager
(VFM).
The FAS3070 is the newest and largest of the FAS3000 line, which
includes the FAS3020 and FAS3050. The latest edition scales to 502
Fibre Channel or
SATA disk drives, or a mix of both for a
total of 252 terabytes (TB), features 16 GB of cache memory and
supports thirty-two 4 Gbps Fibre Channel ports or 32
Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) ports. NetApp's
operating system, Data Ontap 7.2.1 or a later release is
required for the FAS3070, which also runs Data Ontap GX. All
three boxes support Fibre Channel,
iSCSI and
network attached storage (NAS).
The FAS3070 starts at roughly $115,000 for a system with 1 TB of
capacity and is available now. According to NetApp, its closest
competitor is EMC Corp.'s CX3-80.
One user that evaluated both EMC and NetApp went for the FAS3000
line over EMC's Clariion arrays for ease of use and price. "NetApp
was a more intuitive interface for our technical staff … the
management software was easier to grasp," said George J. White,
CIO, Pennsylvania Office of the Attorney General. He said he also
believes they were able to get "more for their money" with NetApp,
although he was unable to give specifics.
The attorney general's office has 14 TB of storage split between
an FAS3050 and FAS3020, the latter being the backup device for the
former. The 3050 is Fibre Channel-attached and resides at a primary
site, while the 3020 is iSCSI-attached and will soon be located at
a remote location, with mirroring between the two. "Fibre Channel
was important for the data center, but the backup device didn't
require the same I/O throughput so we went for iSCSI," White
said.
Microsoft Exchange is the biggest driver of growth at the
attorney general's office -- the organization already has 100 users
testing Exchange 2007 and plans to move all 1,000 employees in the
near future. White is particularly interested in the FAS3070 for
increased performance and capabilities around managing Exchange,
but right now it is halfway through its fiscal year and won't get
budgeted for an upgrade for several months. He noted that another
driver of storage growth is NetApp's snapshot software. While it
does a great job of backup, it "takes up a lot of storage," White
noted.
Updates to SnapManager for Exchange
On the software side, NetApp introduced Protection Manager, a
rudimentary tool for managing disk-based backups in a NetApp
environment. "It provides information like the pace of mirroring …
but down the road it will support more detailed backup reporting,"
said Rich Clifton, vice president and general manager of networked
storage at NetApp.
The company also announced SnapManager for Exchange 4.0 with
updated support for Microsoft Exchange 2007 and SnapManager for
Oracle 2.0 that enables application and database administrators to
back up and recover data in an Oracle environment. New features
include online cloning of the production database and support for
Solaris, SUSE Linux, HP-UX and AIX environments.
NetApp appears to be keeping up development of its global
namespace file virtualization product, VFM, which it sells via an
original equipment manufacturer (OEM) deal with NuView Inc., now
owned by Brocade Communications Inc. VFM has been split into two
versions, Enterprise Edition and Migration Edition. VFM Migration
Edition is a new product but essentially a subset of Enterprise
Edition that enables nondisruptive file migrations without the
global namespace. "It allows us to move large or small amounts of
data from one storage system to another, and professional services
can use this as a tool to upgrade customers from other storage to
ours," Clifton said.
And like everybody else, NetApp now has services wrapped around
all its products. The latest in the list include Exchange, SQL and
Oracle implementation services, and AutoSupport for proactive
alerts.