All-Flash Arrays

Flash technology is driving some of the most exciting developments in the storage industry. This section covers how you can make the best use of flash in your IT infrastructure.

Q&A With NetApp VP on the New “Flash-First” Mindset in Enterprise IT

I recently had an opportunity to interview Lee Caswell, NetApp vice president of Product and Solutions Marketing, about his views on the transition to flash-based systems within the storage industry. Caswell will be a featured speaker at the upcoming NetApp Insight user conference and was a guest speaker at the annual Flash Memory Summit industry conference. Continue Reading

Multi-Core CPUs Turbocharge All-Flash Storage Systems

Server vendors long ago transitioned to multi-core CPU architectures to improve price-performance and maximize the number of virtual servers that can run on a single physical machine. More recently, the I/O demands of fast servers and solid-state storage devices have required storage vendors to make a similar transition. Continue Reading

Look Beyond the IOPS When Evaluating All-Flash Arrays

There’s no shortage of all-flash array (AFA) storage vendors vying for attention this year. Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays catalogs 12 vendors currently offering AFAs, and there are at least another dozen AFA vendors flying under Gartner’s radar. All told, if you are considering an all-flash array, you have well over 50 different models to choose from. Continue Reading

NetApp All-Flash FAS Arrays: A Deep Dive

Many vendors offer high-performance all-flash arrays (AFAs) to address high-throughput workloads with random data access patterns and low latency requirements, such as virtual desktop infrastructure and online transaction processing. AFAs offer performance advantages over hard disk drive-based systems for these workloads, yet many of them lack critical capabilities in one key area: enterprise data management. Continue Reading

NetApp Flash Pool and Flash Cache: A Deep Dive

NetApp has introduced several important innovations since first incorporating flash technology in 2009. On the software side, we have focused on the use of intelligent caching to maximize storage infrastructure efficiency. In hardware, our innovations have focused on high performance and reliability. This article provides a closer look at the hardware elements that enable our hybrid flash arrays: NetApp® Flash Cache™ and NetApp Flash Pool™. Continue Reading