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Keep in mind we do not publish various benchmarks routinely across the product line in a storage family, and, in the case of SPC-1, a decision was made to do the FAS3170 for the FAS3100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.
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