One of the more popular controllers (at least, in my experience) that NetApp offered was the FAS250/FAS270. From the front it looked like a standard DS14 disk shelf, but in the back it contained controller module(s). You could deploy it as a single controller, or in a HA pair and it made a great option for SMBs – it didn’t consume a lot of space since the controller was built into the shelf and the price was entry level. These models went away in favor of the 2000 series controllers which still offered internal drives (12 in the FAS2020/2040 and 20 in the FAS2050) but they used their own form factor and were a dedicated storage appliance. A problem with these controllers was that when you upgraded the system, the internal drives could not be taken out and put into a disk shelf (such as the DS4243). There were ways around this limitation, most notably just not ordering internal drives in the controllers and only using external storage to ease any concerns over future upgrades, but it still was a limitation in my opinion.
Today NetApp is announcing two new controller models that are reminiscent of the FAS200 line. They are the FAS2240-2 and the FAS2240-4, they are 2u and 4u in size respectively. Early performance numbers indicate between a 2-3x performance improvement over the FAS2040 depending on workload type. The FAS2040 will stick around to complete the FAS2000 lineup. This means all current controllers will be able to run the latest ONTAP software from NetApp (the FAS2020 and FAS2050 did not support ONTAP 8.x). As I alluded to previously, the FAS2240 is a storage shelf with the controllers inserted into the back. The 2240-2 is a 2u system and based on the current FAS2246 SAS shelf, while the 2240-4 is a 4u system and based on the current FAS4243 shelf. The FAS2240-2 utilizes 2.5″ SAS drives and supports either 450 or 600GB drives as of today. The FAS2240-4 utilizes 3.5″ SATA drives and supports 1, 2 or 3TB SATA drives as of today. Both systems can be ordered with either 12 or 24 drives.
Some quick notes on the new models:
- Will require ONTAP 8.1+
- Supports a mezzanine card, which can be either a 2 port FC card or 2 port 10 GbE card
- If you put a FC card in the mezzanine slot, they can be either target or initiator ports much like onboard FC ports on other controllers today
- Will support cluster mode, but you have to use the 10 GbE mezzanine card for cluster communication so only iSCSI/CIFS/NFS will work and must be served out of the GbE ports
- Will come with ONTAP Essentials, which means all storage protocols are included (as well as things like Operations Manager, Protection & Provisioning Manager, DSM/MPIO)
- Ability to convert from a controller into a disk shelf (much like the FAS200 line)
- Will not have support for the FlashCache card or FCoE
Front view of the FAS2240-2 controller
Rear view of the FAS2240-2 controller
Front view of the FAS2240-4 controller
Rear view of the FAS2240-4 controller
Also, and in my opinion this is a big one, the maximum volume size is 54TB on the FAS2240 and the maximum volume size with dedupe and/or compression enabled is ALSO 54TB! This is one of the best features of 8.1, 64 bit aggregates in 8.x allowed us to grow beyond a 16TB aggregate limit but we were still limited (at least in some environments) on the volume size to a maximum of 16 TB (depending on the controller model) when using compression and/or dedupe. To reiterate, as of ONTAP 8.1 the maximum volume size for dedupe/compression is now equal to the maximum volume size for the controller – which means it could be anywhere from 30 TB on the (now) entry level FAS2040 to 100 TB on the highest end FAS6280. To determine what the maximum volume size is for your controller, check the System Configuration Guide.
Anyone out there looking at these new controllers from NetApp?
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