NetApp, Inc. has announced a new range of ASA A-Series storage appliances at its annual Insight event in September 2024. The new A70, A90 and A1K models align with the recently refreshed AFF products, bringing in new processors, DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 support.
Background
NetApp has introduced three new ASA A-Series appliances to replace the second-generation ASA products announced in May 2023. ASA, the All-SAN Appliance, is a variation of systems running the ONTAP operating system that only supports block protocols. NetApp claims customer demand for this segment, which offers simplified deployment and management.
The May 2023 release of the ASA A-Series introduced five new models (A900, A800, A400, A250 and A150). The third generation (3.0) of ASA announced at Insight 2024 introduces the A70 (replacing A400), A90 (replacing A800) and A1K (replacing A900). It is notable that the new names align with the AFF A-Series refresh announced in May 2024 and is an obvious alignment of the two product options (side note: we shouldn’t be surprised to see AFF and ASA announcements made together in the future).
ASA 3.0
Internally, ASA 3.0 moves to Intel Sapphire Rapids fourth generation Xeon processors which support PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 memory. This transition is essential for performance and capacity scaling as SSD vendors move to PCIe 5.0 interfaces to support higher capacity and faster devices.
The new ASA models follow a similar form-factor to the AFF A-Series refresh, with A70 and A90 models incorporating drives into a single chassis (4U with 48 drives), while the A1K is a dual server/controller model with separate drive enclosure (two 2U controllers and a 2U enclosure). All models feature expansion capabilities up to a maximum of 16PB of raw capacity and 67PB effective with a 5:1 storage efficiency assumption.
Portfolio Expansion
NetApp has now refreshed or released new hardware in both unified and block-only categories for performance (A-Series) and capacity (C-Series). The hybrid (HDD/SSD) FAS line was also refreshed at Insight 2024 with the release of the FAS70 and FAS90 models. We previously summarised the hardware options in a table, reproduced here.
| Use Case | Low-Cost, Secondary Data | Cost/Performance optimised | High Performance/Tier 1 Workloads |
| Unified Block/File | FAS | AFF C-Series | AFF A-Series |
| Block-Only | ASA C-Series | ASA A-Series |
A-Series products are expected to offer sub-millisecond latency, while the C-Series products are aimed at capturing workloads from competitors that also offer a capacity-flash models and those vendors with no capacity options.
In our November 2023 coverage of Insight, we highlighted that NetApp was in “catch-up mode”, having missed the opportunity for capacity flash models. Looking at the portfolio choices today, that catching up work has been completed, with a simplified and updated range of products that are easier to understand and categorise.
The Architect’s View®
The introduction of the ASA series and subsequent refresh has placed ASA and AFF systems on (almost) the latest Intel processor architecture, deployed consistently across the ONTAP families. NetApp can challenge competitors like Pure Storage, with comparative products, while pushing ahead of Dell and HPE (side note: Dell introduced its first QLC product, the 3200Q in May 2024, but didn’t do a processor update).
The processor architecture change is important because it introduces DDR5 system memory, some processor instruction advancements, but crucially PCIe 5.0 support. PCIe 4.0 SSDs are limited in performance to the speed of the PCIe bus, with PCIe 5.0 devices delivering almost double the bandwidth of PCIe 4.0 SSDs. This change is crucial for large-capacity (> 64TB) devices, where savings will be made by consolidating more capacity on fewer pieces of media.
Foundationally, ONTAP hardware looks to be in a good place, with the work done by Sandeep Singh and his team putting the hardware choices on a solid footing.
It’s interesting to note that despite assumptions to the contrary, centralised storage (in the typical SAN form-factor) is here to stay. Local (DAS) storage is simply a non-starter, while HCI constrains the user to the operating system or hypervisor choice of the vendor. The impact of this is demonstrated clearly by the lock-in of vSAN with VMware vSphere, which requires users to replace both their hypervisor and storage when moving to another platform.
Centralised (SAN) storage will continue to be a significant part of the IT market for many years to come. However, vendors like NetApp need to keep the refresh cycle in place, as end users expect ongoing performance & capacity improvements, with declining $/GB costs. The latest ASA A-Series refresh continues that brief.
As a final comment, we should highlight that NetApp discussed an upcoming disaggregated architecture design, which we will cover in a separate article. This next generation solution could represent the biggest change for ONTAP since the introduction of cluster mode (CDOT) almost fifteen years ago.
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