New FAS3100 midrange platform

[friea]

You've probably seen the press release or read about the new additions to NetApp's midrange family, the FAS3140 and FAS3170. As you would expect, these platforms feature innovations such as a HA configuration in a single 6u chassis and embedded NVRAM on the motherboard to add a slot for more scalability options. Not surprisingly, there are significant performance improvements as well.

A recent Tech OnTap article (How the FAS3100 Nailed the Price/Performance Sweet Spot) features two FAS3100 engineers discussing the new platform plus the results of three performance benchmarks.

The team would love to hear from you and get your feedback about whether this new platform helps address your storage requirements?

[rickkcir1]

My only complaint about the article is they don't compare the 3040 to the 3140. One of the graphs compares the 3040 to the 3170 ( seems irrelevlant to me), then another the 3070 to the 3170, which makes sense..

The Specs make it appear you are going backward in connectivity.. yet the benefits are perfomance.... just thought it would have helped to show more specific comparisons ( apples to apples) and an explanation of why the port loss may not be an issue?

[milun]

Having just 2 GigE ports per head seems like a problem to me.

For iSCSI, if you want redundancy across switches, you want 4 ports (2 each for front-end and back-end).

For NFS use, we use one non-VIF'd port for Management, and then VIF two ports together for data, and have tagged VLANs on that VIF. (Having a "plain" port for management is useful, as it comes up quicker during the boot process, which helps if there are config problems, etc.)

Davin.

[rickkcir1]

Agreed.. good news is, quad cards or iSCSI / TOE's can be configured with the 3140/3170s .. but.. just seemed strange to reduce ports , and not mention any effects to architecture issues such as those that you point out

~Rick

[lueth]

We received several comments about the FAS3100 Tech OnTap article and thought a consolidated response would be helpful. Hopefully, these responses will adequately address the comments we've received so far.

Since the FAS3040 already provides industry leading performance, that wasn't the focus of the FAS3140 design. Instead, FAS3140 improvements over FAS3040 are feature-related (higher capacity, added I/O slot, etc.). So, performance-wise, the FAS3140 performs fairly close to the FAS3040 hence its omission from this short article.

Keep in mind we do not publish various benchmarks routinely across the product line in a storage family, and, in the case of SPC-1, a decision was made to do the FAS3170 for the FAS3100 series the FAS3040 for the FAS3000 series. So, the main reason for showing SPC-1 results between the FAS3040 and FAS3170 is because we don't have approved results for the FAS3070. There was some back and forth about comparing the FAS3170 to the FAS3040 in the article, but, in the end, it seemed more useful to provide a comparison chart rather than just stating the FAS3170 SPC-1 results.

In regards to slots, while there are two less GbE ports on the FAS3100 series compared to the FAS3000 there is an extra slot versus the FAS3000 series. Because of this extra slot, the FAS3100 series actually offers an increase in port density compared to the FAS3000 series. Also, there is also a separate management interface on the FAS3100 series that shows up as e0M in Data ONTAP. This interface allows you have a separate management subnet for the FAS3100 without carving out a data port for this purpose.

Thanks for reading the Tech OnTap article and providing us with feedback. Your feedback helps us make these articles better over time and more useful to you as well.