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New FAS3100 and V3100 Storage System Series, Storage Acceleration Appliance, and Performance Acceleration Module Enable Customers to Transform Their Technical Computing Environments: NetApp today announced new solutions to help customers transform their engineering data centers and high-performance computing environments. With today’s news, NetApp is delivering business breakthroughs and enabling customers to achieve greater speed, value, and efficiency with the following benefits:

• Accelerate time to market: Engineering customers can meet the needs of their most demanding technical applications with a highly scalable, high-performance system to speed product cycle times, from concept to delivery and distribution.
• Improve engineering productivity: NetApp helps engineers increase productivity and quickly react to changing market conditions with efficient data access and data consistency, which speed up simulation and improve global collaboration.
• Save all over the place: Customers can maximize the return on their storage infrastructure by decreasing administrative overhead and costs and achieving greater storage efficiency to reduce power, space, and cooling.

“More than ever before, enterprises in the high-performance computing market are under intense global competition and in need of solutions that will help them get to market—and increase revenues—faster,” said Earl Joseph, program vice president, IDC. “At the same time, budgets are remaining flat or decreasing in the face of exploding storage needs. Many of these enterprises are realizing that storage is just as important as their servers and technical applications in their data centers. The more they can get out of their storage systems, the more they can get out of their science and engineering innovation.” To help customers get more performance and scalability out of their storage, NetApp introduced the following new products:

• FAS3100 and V3100 storage system series: NetApp’s new FAS3140 and FAS3170 storage systems enable customers to meet their diverse storage needs and achieve high levels of availability for their critical business operations and technical applications. The NetApp FAS3100 series provides improved performance and scalability over other midrange storage systems. While competitive offerings provide disparate products that create additional integration and collaboration issues, NetApp helps customers maximize their engineering staff productivity with a single unified architecture approach and a common suite of application-aware software and management tools that are inherent in the Data ONTAP operating system, including powerful features such as thin provisioning, deduplication, Snapshot, RAID-DP, and FlexVol. NetApp’s new V3140 and V3170 extend virtualization to other vendors’ legacy arrays and leverage the same Data ONTAP operating system that is the foundation of all virtualization functions and integration in NetApp FAS systems. This gives customers the same architecture, software, and management tools for a true, powerful differentiator in mutivendor environments.
• Storage Acceleration Appliance: The Storage Acceleration Appliance—which includes three models, the SA200, SA300, and SA600—is based on NetApp FlexCache technology. It represents the first caching appliance available from a major storage systems vendor. It can be used to accelerate performance at the data center where the central data repository is located or to improve response time and enhance collaboration within remote offices. Now customers can leverage FlexCache with both Data ONTAP 7G and Data ONTAP GX to achieve better performance and protect their existing investments without rearchitecting their technical computing environments.
• Performance Acceleration Module: This add-on intelligent read cache provides a new way to optimize performance of mainstream storage platforms. Now customers have a cost-effective means for improving performance for workloads that are random-read intensive such as file serving. One or more modules fit into PCI Express slots of an existing storage controller, where they function as a read cache to increase throughput and reduce latency. This gives customers a cost-effective, innovative way to scale their storage systems without having to add additional disk drives to increase I/O rates. Additionally, the module consumes 95% less power than a shelf of Fibre Channel disk drives.

“Our data demands were skyrocketing because so much of the work we do is cutting edge, and our scientists need to be able to keep everything their research generates,” said Greg Stazyk, systems coordinator at the Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre (GSC). GSC employs over 200 scientists and researchers and carries out genomic research and bioinformatics using one of the most advanced computing platforms in the world built on a high-performance Linux cluster. “Sequencing production processes generate tens of millions of files. In fact, a single volume can contain nearly 30 million files,” continued Stazyk. “We had absolutely reached the performance, reliability, and manageability limits of our existing file server structure. NetApp allowed us to keep pace with our storage demands and keep our production pipelines operating interruption free. As a result, biologist productivity has improved dramatically, and we’re doing a lot more with less budget than ever before. The NetApp storage solution has enabled us to do better science.” “IPLogic has a core focus which strongly revolves around the LAN and WAN. Our partnership with NetApp allows us to provide a true end-to-end data center solution where we can address the complete technology lifecycle,” said Chris Fox, director of Data Storage and Protection, IPLogic, a leading communications technology solutions provider and a Professional Services Certified Partner in the NetApp VIP Program and participating partner in the Authorized Professional Service Partner Program. “The NetApp unified architecture takes the complexity out of data storage, and NetApp's flexibility and scalability are unmatched in the marketplace. This ease of use combined with increased storage utilization rates, decreased disk TCO, and tight application integration allows us to provide a great value to our customers.” NetApp Delivers Superior Performance in the Engineering Data Center With the introduction of the FAS3100 series, NetApp has published two new industry standard performance benchmarks across different storage workloads. Representing file services-based workloads, which are prevalent in engineering data centers and technical computing, NetApp posted a SPEC_SFS97 score of 137,306 IOPS with 0.94ms overall response time (ORT) with the FAS3170. Carrying on the strong performance that NetApp published earlier this year in transaction-based (OLTP) workloads, NetApp posted a new SPC Benchmark 1 (SPC1) score of 60,515.34 SPC-1 IOPS with the FAS3170. These results show that NetApp FAS platforms continue to provide data at rates needed to keep the most demanding applications running smoothly. Complete benchmark results can be found at www.spec.org and www.storageperformance.org. Enhanced Support Capabilities for the Engineering Data Center In addition to today’s solutions and product news, NetApp introduced enhanced support capabilities to help customers realize the NetApp advantage in their engineering data centers. NetApp Remote Support Agent is an intelligent remote diagnostics data collector that is embedded in the NetApp system. Simple to use and install, the Remote Support Agent will proactively open support tickets and allow NetApp support engineers to remotely access system log files to quickly diagnose and resolve issues. In addition, NetApp Professional Services enable customers to realize the full advantage of NetApp products for the engineering data center with assessment, implementation, and management services that accelerate customers’ data center transformation. To learn more about NetApp Professional Services, visit its Web site. “In today’s competitive market environment and economic uncertainty, customers are looking for innovative solutions and support that will further drive cost and complexity out of their data centers,” said Jay Kidd, chief marketing officer at NetApp. “We are helping customers transform their data centers to achieve a greater competitive business advantage and solve real-world problems of time to market and engineering staff productivity. We are committed to driving innovation in the engineering and high-performance computing data center that will deliver greater performance and scalability and strengthen our promise of being a trusted partner—something our customers and channel and technology partners expect from NetApp.” Additional Resources For more information on NetApp’s vision for the future of enterprise storage and a scale-out architecture, read the white paper “Scale-Out Storage and the Dynamic Data Center,” at its Web site. The paper describes the requirements for scale-out storage in the enterprise in terms of resiliency, scalability, manageability, and other factors and discusses the current state of NetApp scale-out deployments as well as specific operational and business advantages that the NetApp approach delivers to the enterprise data center. Also, visit NetApp TechTalk online events at its Web site for a podcast with Jay Kidd, NetApp's chief marketing officer, titled “Transforming the Engineering Data Center” for his perspective on NetApp’s latest innovations, which are giving engineering customers a competitive edge. In a separate podcast titled “How NetApp Data ONTAP GX Simplifies Capacity and Performance Growth,” Bruce Moxon, vice president of Strategic Technology at NetApp, discusses how enterprises can run their most demanding applications using a scale-out storage architecture that provides nondisruptive upgrades and transparent data migrations. Pricing and Availability All customer pricing for products described in this press release is available from NetApp sales or reseller partners. All new products and support are available immediately. To learn more about how NetApp is helping customers transform their engineering data centers and high-performance computing environments, please visit www.netapp.com/us/company/leadership/data-center-transformation. (Due to its length, this URL may need to be copied/pasted into your Internet browser's address field. Remove the extra space if one exists.)