NetApp EF540 Flash Array

The NetApp® EF540 flash array is an all-SSD storage system designed spe- cifically for database-driven business operations that demand the highest levels of performance, reliability, and availability. Requiring just 2U of rack space, the EF540 flash array combines extreme IOPS, submillisecond response times, and up to 6GBps of bandwidth with leading enterprise-proven availability features, including:

• Redundant components with automated failover
• Intuitive storage management with comprehensive tuning functions
• Advanced monitoring and diagnostics with proactive repair
• Snapshot copies and remote replication for subsecond backup and long-distance recovery

Combined, these capabilities enable the EF540 flash array to improve the speed of business as well as the overall efficiency and reliability of IT operations. This win for both the business and IT translates to a better overall experience for both you and your customers.

Extreme Performance

The EF540 flash array continues NetApp’s longstanding heritage of delivering powerful solutions to meet unique business needs. Designed specifically for customers with high- speed, transactional applications that demand high IOPS and low latency, the EF540 flash array delivers over 300,000 sustained IOPS and submillisecond response times. Bandwidth-oriented workloads also benefit from the EF540’s ability to provide up to 6GBps of throughput.

The all-flash design is built in a 2U enclosure and delivers the performance of over a thousand 15,000-RPM drives while requiring just 5% of the rack space, power, and cooling. This reduction of up to 95% in space and power consumption allows the EF540 flash array to significantly improve the overall efficiency of IT operations while continuing to meet performance requirements from business operations.

High Availability and Enterprise Reliability

Because the applications that the EF540 flash array is designed to support are often the heart of a corporation’s business processes, the EF540 has been built with enterprise reliability in mind. The EF540 flash array leverages lessons learned across 650,000 system installations to provide enterprise reliability and fault tolerance in both the architecture and the system code.

To allow recovery in the event of an environment issue or component failure, the EF540 flash array includes fully redundant I/O paths with automated failover, extensive diagnostic capa- bilities that alert on and help resolve failures, and advanced data protection features. All management tasks are performed while the storage remains online with complete read/write data access. This allows storage administra- tors to make configuration changes and conduct maintenance without disrupting application I/O.
As IT staff knows, one of the most criti- cal aspects of an enterprise solution is the ability to detect and resolve issues. In this area, the EF540 flash array pro- vides significant depth of capabilities:

• Extensive capturing and monitoring of diagnostic data provide compre- hensive fault isolation and simplify analysis of unanticipated events.
• SSD wear life is proactively tracked and alerts are issued when the threshold is reached.
• Integrated Recovery Guru diagnoses problems and provides the applicable procedure to use for recovery.
• Background media scan identifies parity inconsistencies, rewrites sectors that might not have been properly written, and reallocates defective sectors.
• “Lost” data can be recreated on the fly using redundancy.
• A drive rebuild can continue even when encountering an unreadable sector (patented).

Advanced Data Protection

The EF540 flash array offers advanced data protection common to enterprise storage to protect against data loss and downtime events, both locally and over a long distance. These features include:

• Snapshot copies. Create and restore point-in-time copies of datasets in under a second to protect against accidental data loss on the local array.
• Remote replication. Provide long- distance disaster recovery to a remote site or colocation facility to enable your business operations to continue running no matter what happens.

Unique to the EF540 flash array is the capability to replicate data to either an EF540 or a NetApp E-Series system. This capability allows you the choice of creating a high-speed, low-latency recovery system that will run at the same speed as your production opera- tions and/or fail over to a consolidated E-Series system with more cost-effective disk storage. This flexibility in design allows you to choose the profile of performance and cost unique to your business.

Simple, Robust Management

The EF540 flash array runs on the enterprise-proven SANtricity® software platform. Optimized for flash, SANtricity software allows storage administrators to achieve maximum performance and utilization of their EF540 through extensive configuration flexibility, custom performance tuning, and complete control over data placement. Its graphically based performance tools provide key information on storage I/O from multiple viewpoints, allowing administrators to make informed deci- sions on configuration adjustments to further refine performance. And with its dynamic capabilities, SANtricity software, without interrupting storage system I/O, supports on-the-fly expansion, recon- figurations, and maintenance.

• Dynamic capacity expansion and dynamic volume expansion features let you expand capacity so maxi- mum performance and utilization are assured.
• Dynamic RAID-level migration changes the RAID level of a RAID group on the existing drives without requiring the relocation of data. Supported RAID levels are 0, 1, 3, 5, 6, and 10.
• Nondisruptive controller firmware upgrades (no interruption to data access) are supported.

  Professional Services

  NetApp Professional Services can assist you in any and every phase of the storage lifecycle. Whether you need help planning your next-generation storage system, need an extra set of hands for a major storage deployment, or want to upgrade your existing infrastructure, NetApp Professional Services personnel have the skills and expertise you need. They offer:

  • Solution suites. These customized solutions are designed to address your business-level challenges holistically.
  • Assessment services. Enlist NetApp to identify and document business, storage, and infrastructure require- ments and provide recommendations for improvements.
  • Consulting services. Reduce the complexity of your networked storage implementation when our experts design, document, and implement a range of applications and solutions.
  • Deployment/implementation services. Reduce risk when we prepare your site, install and connect systems, set up your software, and perform complete verification.
  • Managed services. Have NetApp experts on site to perform storage management services so you can focus on core business initiatives.

  Global Support

  NetApp Global Support delivers the highest availability for your enterprise data environment and helps you optimize your storage investments. Let NetApp mitigate support issues and drive operational best practices. NetApp’s innovative, proactive support means you’ll have fewer and less severe support cases. But if a problem arises, our award-winning technical centers and field support staff—delivering in over 100 countries—won’t rest until it’s solved. As an industry leader in innovation, NetApp Global Support provides tools and technology to enable business continuity. AutoSupport, NetApp’s suite of automation tools, is delivered as a service to help you proactively manage your systems and quickly resolve issues. AutoSupport functions as a “virtual staff” to protect critical data, save time, and reduce impact on your IT resources