NetApp Showcases New 10Gb FAS Capabilities

October 3rd, 2006: Network Appliance has become the next vendor to announce 10Gb Ethernet support by beefing up its high-end and mid-range fabric attached storage devices.

As the storage industry rampages forward, vendors are increasingly implementing 10Gb support to quench their customer’s thirst for speed, and drive for cost effective solutions.

Because of this, both of NetApp’s FAS3000 and FAS6000 fabric-attached storage (FAS) platforms were “10Gb Ethernet ready” when they were announced, thanks to their new contemporary high-speed I/O architectures. The NetApp software architecture provided support for the latest generation of 10Gb Ethernet Network Interface Cards with the release of Data ONTAP 7.2.

10Gb Ethernet is the next generation of Ethernet, and one that maintains backward compatibility with previous generations by supporting network services such as VLANs, spanning tree, QoS, VoIP, security and more. While 10Gb Ethernet products have been available since 2002, initial support focused on switch-to-switch connectivity rather than across the whole network. Now that prices are coming down, NetApp says that this generation provides much more affordable connectivity for storage and host environments.

The company says it has tested the functionality of its new solutions with 10GbE switches from Foundry and Cisco, and with iSCSI software initiators for Red Hat Linux, Suse Linux, Sun Solaris 10, and Microsoft Windows environments.

Due to this wide support, NetApp says that its 10Gb Ethernet-connected FAS storage systems have the capacity to support large-scale storage consolidation, simultaneously support hundreds of SAN- and NAS-based applications and large numbers of hosts. It says its systems support both IP SAN using iSCSI protocol as well as NAS using NFS and CIFS protocols.

“The availability of 10Gb Ethernet connectivity will benefit all of our IP-based storage solutions: NFS, CIFS, and iSCSI,” says Rich Clifton, vice president and general manager of NetApp’s Networked Storage business unit. “The aggressive NetApp support for 10Gb Ethernet demonstrates the ongoing commitment we make to our customers to deliver powerful solutions that help them gain more value from their data infrastructure.”

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