Why ASA

jyhshing · ‎2025-07-18

Why ASA

The new NetApp® All-flash SAN Array (ASA) scale-out storage systems are simple, powerful, optimized for SAN deployments and support advanced data management and protection features. The ASA systems support IP-based and FC-based SAN protocols with symmetric active-active multipathing for mission-critical enterprise applications such as Microsoft SQL, Oracle databases and VMware virtual infrastructure.

The table below highlights some of the technical specifications of the new NetApp ASA A-Series systems for comparison. Please refer to NetApp ASA datasheet and NetApp Hardware Universe for specification details of the ASA systems and their supported limits.

Select Specifications	ASA A1K	ASA A90	ASA A70	ASA A50	ASA A30	ASA A20
Form factor	2 x 2U	4U	4U	2U	2U	2U
Max cluster size	12 Nodes	12 Nodes	12 Nodes	12 Nodes	8 Nodes	6 Nodes
Max raw capacity per HA pair	2.67 PB	2.67 PB	2.67 PB	1.8 PB	1.1 PB	734 TB
Max raw capacity per cluster	16 PB	16 PB	16 PB	11 PB	4.4 PB	2.2 PB
PCIe expansion slots per HA pair	18	18	18	8	8	8
Max FC speed	64 Gbps	64 Gbps	64 Gbps	64 Gbps	64 Gbps	64 Gbps
Max Ethernet speed	200 Gbps	200 Gbps	200 Gbps	100 Gbps	100 Gbps	100 Gbps

With immutable ONTAP Snapshots, your mission-critical SAN data can be recovered to any point in time. To further protect against any potential infrastructure disasters, your data can be safeguarded with multi-site NetApp ASA clusters. You can achieve synchronous data replication by configuring ONTAP SnapMirror active sync feature to replicate SAN data included in application-specific consistency groups. This ensures zero Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO), thereby maintaining seamless business continuity.

Why FlexPod SAN solutions

FlexPod® is a best practice converged infrastructure data center architecture that includes the following components from Cisco® and NetApp:

Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS®)
Cisco Nexus and MDS families of switches
NetApp Fabric-Attached Storage (FAS), All-Flash FAS (AFF), and All-flash SAN Array (ASA).

Each of the FlexPod component families shown (Cisco UCS, Cisco Nexus/MDS switches, and NetApp storage) provides platform and resource options to scale the infrastructure up or down as per application requirement, while supporting the features and functionalities that are required under the configuration and connectivity best practices of FlexPod.

All FlexPod components have been integrated so you can deploy the solution quickly and economically while eliminating many of the risks associated with researching, designing, building, and deploying similar solutions from the foundation. FlexPod solution design is flexible enough that the networking, computing, and storage can fit in one data center rack or be deployed according to a customer's data center design.

The reference architectures available as Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs) and NetApp Verified Architectures (NVAs) provide details of the highly available solution design and implementation which makes it simple to deploy FlexPod solutions. With Cisco UCS, the template-based and profile-based server management makes it easy to enforce configuration consistency for your servers and simplify server life-cycle management such as server replacement while maintaining server identities.

FlexPod SAN solution deployment with NetApp ASA

FlexPod SAN solutions can be built by using any supported hardware components and software versions that are listed in the NetApp Interoperability Matrix Tool, Cisco UCS Hardware and Software Compatibility List, and Broadcom Compatibility Guide.

The FlexPod solution team recently published a NetApp ASA based FlexPod SAN solution NVA: FlexPod SAN Solution with Cisco UCS X-Series Direct and NetApp ASA. For this FlexPod SAN NVA solution, we focused on the deployment of Cisco Intersight managed UCS X-Series Direct, NetApp ASA A50 storage system, VMware virtual infrastructure, NetApp ONTAP tools for VMware vSphere, Microsoft SQL server, and Oracle RAC database using iSCSI protocol in a direct-attached storage configuration.

Example solution topology and hardware / software components

Some customer use cases and applications might require starting with a medium solution scale where the compute and storage resources and performances might start small but requires a certain amount of solution scaling as their business grow. There might also be mandates for the solution to be deployed cost effectively for multiple offices or for multiple applications.

The FlexPod SAN solution with Cisco UCS X-Series Direct and the mid-range NetApp ASA A50 is a great combination for this target solution scale. The X-Series Direct integrates the UCS Fabric Interconnects (FIs), UCSX-S9108-100G (S9108), in the X9508 chassis, thus reducing the UCS rack space requirements and costs for building a medium-scale FlexPod SAN solutions.

By configuring some of the FI ports as appliance ports, you can directly attach the NetApp ASA storage systems to the FIs without requiring additional Ethernet switches in between UCS compute and NetApp storage as shown in the figure below.

The table below shows a list of the hardware components and software revisions that can be used to deploy VMware virtual infrastructure, Microsoft SQL server, and Oracle databases using the scalable FlexPod SAN infrastructure above.

Component	Product	Version
Compute	Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnects UCSX-S9108-100G (Intersight managed mode)	4.3(5.240191)
	Cisco UCSX-215c-M8	5.3(0.250001)
	CPU	AMD EPYC 9534 64-Core CPU 2.45GHz
	Cisco VIC 15230 UCSX-ML-V5D200GV2	5.3(4.84)
Network	Cisco Nexus 93600CD-GX NX-OS	10.4(4)M
Storage	NetApp ASA A50 ONTAP	9.16.1P3
Software	Cisco Intersight	SaaS
	VMware vSphere	vSphere 8 update 3
	Cisco VIC nenic driver	2.0.15.0
	VMware vCenter	vCenter 8 update 3
	NetApp ONTAP tools for VMware vSphere	10.4
	Oracle Database 21c Grid Infrastructure	21.3
	Oracle Database 21c Enterprise Edition	21.3
	SLOB	2.5.4.0
	Microsoft Windows Server 2022 Datacenter	10.0.20348
	Microsoft SQL Server	2022
	Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio	20.2.1
	HammerDB	4.12

Solution availability and life-cycle management

FlexPod SAN solution infrastructure is designed to provide a highly resilient SAN environment for your mission-critical applications. The infrastructure resiliency is the result of ensuring no single-point-of-failure scenarios by deploying the solution infrastructure with redundant components and redundant connectivity between components.

Thanks to this redundant infrastructure design, the solution infrastructure provides multiple available paths for the servers in the SAN ecosystem to connect to the underlying storage whether the storage solution is using SCSI LUNs with iSCSI protocol or using NVMe namespaces with NVMe/TCP protocol.

For IP-based SAN multipathing, two independent SAN fabric are available in the solution: one using FI A and the other using FI B. The Virtual Interface Card (VIC) 15230 card in the X215c M8 compute node in the UCS X-Series Direct solution provides the server’s internal connectivity to both FI A and FI B using virtual NIC (vNIC) paths pinned to the respective fabrics.

The ASA A50 dual controller storage system has two controllers: controller A and controller B. Each controller is connected to both FI A and FI B for IP-based SAN connectivity as shown in the figure. With symmetric active-active multipathing support in ASA, an iSCSI LUN can be accessed from both controllers. When one iSCSI LIF per fabric is created on each storage controller, there should be four total active/optimized paths to each iSCSI LUN for this configuration.

In this FlexPod SAN solution with Cisco UCS X-Series Direct and NetApp ASA NVA, it also includes sections with VMware infrastructure, Microsoft SQL and Oracle RAC database application deployment information, sections which highlight tests performed to ensure infrastructure resiliency and solution availability when there is a component failure. Furthermore, it covers life-cycle management tasks such as component software / firmware upgrades which is important to keep your solution updated to adopt new features or to address bugs and security concerns.

How to get started

By following FlexPod NVAs and CVDs, FlexPod SAN solutions deployment is greatly simplified. It also eliminates many of the risks associated with the solution design and deployment. You can get started easily by evaluating your SAN solution requirements, identifying the amount of compute resources and storage performance and capacity you need, and then engage a NetApp partner to help you pick out the optimal FlexPod SAN solution components for your current needs and future growths. Afterwards, you can easily deploy your solution by following the FlexPod SAN solution with Cisco UCS X-Series Direct and NetApp ASA NVA or reference additional FlexPod SAN solution design and deployment guides available from the FlexPod Design Guides and FlexPod Solutions web sites.