Data Management Storage West Midlands

How to realise the lowest latencies for your enterprise applications

When it comes to artificial intelligence and machine learning applications, every microsecond counts. As well as ensuring you have sufficient processing power, it is essential that you remove latency from every layer of your technology stack.

As you would expect when dealing with enormous data sets, choice of storage is critical. For cutting edge AI models to operate optimally, you will need cutting edge storage to underpin it. And this is where the NetApp AFF A-series comes into its own.

All Flash Arrays – obviously

Flash storage currently outperforms any other medium, so it is the natural choice for mission-critical operations. As the name implies – AFF – the NetApp A-series is an all-flash array, using high speed SSD drives to deliver up to 1.4 million IOPS.

No other storage medium is suitable for processing mission-critical applications involving large data sets – up to 702.7PB with the NetApp AFF family. And with native de-duplication, compression and compacting, these systems ensure your storage space is maximised, increasing return on investment and lowering total cost of ownership.

NVMe for maximum throughput

You can further reduce latency by accelerating data transfer between storage and CPU. The NetApp A-Series systems offers NVMe/TCP for connection to existing ethernet infrastructure. Alternatively, double IOPS potential and halve latency the latency found in traditional channel connections with NVMe/FC. Whichever you choose, NVMe connectivity will also allow you to attach ultra-high-performance storage to your existing SAN without disrupting operations to achieve up to 300GB/s throughput.

Flexible connectivity options

In the modern hybrid cloud operating environment, your business needs seamless connectivity to on- and off-premises systems. In addition to high-speed NVMe, the A-series also offers a complete range of alternative technologies including iSCSI, FCoE, NFS, SMB, Amazon S3.

This means that A-series systems will slot directly into your existing infrastructure. You can take advantage of ultra-high performance SSD storage for local processing and off-load lower priority workloads to low-cost secondary systems or cloud platforms.

Scalability

In addition to support for external services, the NetApp A-series is also fully scalable. As your demands increase, the system scales to 24 nodes for a maximum total capacity of 702.7PB of high resilience, high performance all flash storage.

And as you would expect, the A-series is fully supported by ONTAP software to simplify the process of managing and optimising your storage workloads. ONTAP allows you to scale at speed whenever your applications demand.

Find out more

Ready to learn more about the NetApp AFF A-series and how it will help your business achieve its high-performance computing objectives? Get in touch today and our team of storage experts will guide you through the benefits and features so you understand where the A-series fits into your storage strategy.

 

 

 

NetApp

How NetApp became a vital part of your public cloud strategy

As businesses look to balance current resource demands with strategic growth plans, hybrid cloud offers a useful platform for both. Now research from IDC suggests that NetApp is a critical enabler of hybrid cloud strategies – and you should seriously consider these technologies for your projects.

Leading the way with NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

NetApp’s flagship ONTAP technology has been instrumental in helping existing customers embrace the public cloud. Using the same familiar interfaces and tools, ONTAP users can quickly and easily manage workloads in any location – including the cloud.

ONTAP is now available on all the major platforms – AWS, Azure and Google Cloud – allowing users to expand into the public cloud within a matter of minutes.

And for non-NetApp users?

NetApp has continued to develop tools to assist businesses with their strategic cloud tools – including those who are not currently customers. NetApp Cloud Volume Service is a fully managed file storage service that accelerates the journey to the cloud and helps users maximise value from their hosted investments.

With the Cloud Volume Service subscribers can get started immediately; there is no need to own any other NetApp products or services. They still benefit from the same file storage technologies, but with the added benefit of expert management.

Azure users have an additional benefit – the Cloud Volume Service can be purchased from Microsoft direct as a native service This reduces the number of contracts and suppliers you need to deal with, further lowering TCO.

But why NetApp?

This all sounds great in principle – but why has IDC singled out NetApp specifically? Two major reasons – flexibility and future-proofing.

Initially, NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP was designed to allow users to migrate workloads between on-premise data centres and the cloud. As hosted technology has matured, businesses have begun to consider the potential of multi-cloud infrastructure. By selecting the best services from each vendor, they can better contain cloud costs, increase flexibility and optimise the performance of every aspect of operations.

Because ONTAP and Cloud Volume Services are available on multiple platforms, moving files between providers becomes much easier – and potentially quicker too. NetApp empowers businesses to migrate between providers to ensure they are always receiving the best value from their investments and allowing them to change providers as circumstances change.

Discover the NetApp cloud

IDC advice is clear. Businesses should seriously consider NetApp’s cloud service offerings to improve cost and performance for their cloud workloads. The ability to view workloads wherever they are located (on-premise or in the cloud) will allow them to deliver a consistently good experience in any setting.

To learn more about NetApp cloud services and how they will help you turbocharge your file storage strategy, please get in get in touch.