New models of storage for the masses

If you still don’t believe the low end of the market is the next big untapped networked storage opportunity, then take a peek at what Network Appliance is doing.

In a nutshell, the company has added two new models, the 250 and 270, to its FAS (Fabric Attached Storage) line. It has also expanded OS support beyond Solaris and Windows to include Linux and Unix flavors from both Hewlett-Packard and IBM. Finally, NetApp has strengthened its offering of WORM (write-once-read-many) software for data archival.

Let’s start with the new WORM application. One of the many existing applications from NetApp is SnapLock, which helps companies meet United States Securities and Exchange Commission-mandated tampering-prevention regulations. Building on that foundation, NetApp is now offering a new software app, SnapLock Enterprise, which should offer similar features to companies that are not under stringent regulations but want to preserve corporate information from inadvertent or malicious changes. NetApp envisions customers will use SnapLock Enterprise as a more flexible, online alternative to tape-based WORM archival for a variety of historical data including blueprints, product sales records, and scientific archives.

On the hardware front, the FAS250 is a self-contained, 3U-high storage array that hosts as many as 14 FC (Fibre Channel) drives for a total capacity of as much as 1TB. What do I mean by self-contained? Unlike previous models, the FAS250 doesn’t require a separate “head” or controller box. Instead, the FAS250 includes what’s essentially a two-processor blade server, hosting NetApp’s operating system, Data ONTAP, within the disk enclosure.

Interestingly, the FAS250 supports simultaneous block-access and file-sharing, which, together with an entry price of $10,000 for a .5TB configuration, makes for an appealing storage device that consolidates NAS and SAN capabilities in the same box. Notably, despite having FC drives, SAN access to the FAS250 is only via the iSCSI protocol, which seems appropriate for its target entry-level customers, but could sound restrictive to companies with more ambitious growth plans.

According to NetApp, when you outgrow the 1TB capacity of the FAS250, you just change the FAS250 head with an FAS270. The FAS270 handles as many as three storage enclosures, can be ordered in clustered configurations, and supports FC access to block data.

The FAS270 can store as much as 4TB. But because NetApp’s storage enclosures are compatible across the FAS family, further expansion to as much as 48TB is possible by replacing the “shrunken heads” of FAS200 units with larger models’ controllers.

This impressive scalability (from 1TB to 48TB) and its preservation of the array content are perhaps the most interesting characteristics of the FAS200 models. The concurrent NAS and SAN support, along with the extensive portfolio of applications, leaves little to be desired. The existing mirroring, snapshot, and backup functionality combined with the new SnapLock Enterprise should attract both new entry-level prospects and repeat business from customers looking to improve departmental storage.