NetApp SolidFire All-Flash Array
Storage Built for the Next Generation Data Center

Overview:

Achieve the next-generation data center.

Modern data centers require storage that’s as innovative as the business models they must enable. SolidFire’s scale-out, 100% predictable, and fully automated platform gives you total flexibility in all-flash storage. Now you can easily and non-disruptively deploy guaranteed application performance at unlimited scale—no matter how you consume storage.

Maximum Flexibility for Consuming All-Flash Storage

• Turn-Key Storage
  Accelerate next-generation data center deployments with a complete hardware + software solution.
• Capacity-Based Licensing
  Get greater versatility and value from your storage investment than you ever could with legacy storage.
• Customized Hardware
  Take advantage of your supply chain with software-only licensing for your storage hardware.

Increase infrastructure agility and responsiveness to deploy applications, services, and all your VMs up to 15x faster than with traditional architectures. With SolidFire, you can grow seamlessly from 20TB to petabytes without data migrations or forklift upgrades.

Guarantee workload performance
Deliver predictable performance to hundreds of applications on a single platform—every time.

Automate your entire storage infrastructure
Plug into a robust, REST-based API that automates every aspect of storage provisioning, management, and reporting.

Scale-out without limitations
Accelerate IT service delivery with a building-block approach to delivering capacity and performance on demand.

Why SolidFire

The agility, efficiency, and scalability benefi ts demonstrated from cloud computing infrastructure have raised the bar on expectations for IT service delivery. The pressure is on IT to:

• Rapidly deploy applications and service
• Provide more agile and scalable infrastructure
• Increase application performance and predictability
• Enable automation and end-user self service
• Raise operational e ciency and reduce cost

SolidFire is architected from the ground up to be the storage foundation of next generation data centers.

Element OS Software

SolidFire Element OS is THE storage operating system of the next generation data center and is included on every SF Series Appliance. The operating system provides all the features you demand from primary storage — total reliability, all-flash performance, end-to-end security, and more — plus all five criteria for delivering agile, predictable storage performance.

• True scale-out architecture
• Guaranteed performance
• Automated management
• Data assurance
• Global efficiencies

SolidFire SF-Series Hardware

SolidFire SF-series storage nodes are the building blocks of a SolidFire platform, allowing you to build a broad range of scale-out, all-flash storage systems that are highly available and easy to control. Mix and match any SolidFire node within a system to take advantage of the most current and cost-effective flash systems available.

• Scale a single system predictably without performance degradation
• 20TB to petabytes of effective capacity
• 200K to millions of IOPS

Active Support

Proactive, comprehensive support that solves most problems before they’re ever problematic. SolidFire Active Support continuously monitors your systems, ensuring SolidFire products are maintained and operated at the highest possible level of availability and performance.

Proactive philosophy

• Secure assist
• 24/7/365 worldwide availability
• Expert tier 3-support engineers only
• Active IQ

Together, SolidFire and NetApp are launching the next era of infrastructure.

All-flash arrays are becoming the default choice in storage, and the integrated NetApp and SolidFire flash portfolio accelerates data center transformation with a flash-first model. Now, customers can achieve the best outcomes across all major data center deployment models — performance applications, virtualized infrastructure, and cloud infrastructure.

• Tremendously scalable storage to meet any requirement of rapid growth.
• Breakthrough performance that guarantees predictability for all workloads and tenants.
• Unbelievable data flexibility across your IT organization.

Features:

The most complete feature set in all-flash storage. And then some.

Beyond just all-flash speed, SolidFire has all the traditional features you expect from storage — real-time replication, integrated backup/recovery, end-to-end security, and broad integrations for VMware, OpenStack, and more. That's just the beginning.

SolidFire delivers all the transformative capabilities you need to deploy new applications and capabilities faster, more securely, with greater agility, and more cost-efficiently.

Automated Management

• Automatic distribution and load balancing
• Comprehensive API
• Complete Management Integrations

Scale-out

• 10’s of TBs to multiple PBs
• Non-disruptive scaling and no downtime
• Mix nodes in same cluster

Guaranteed Performance

• Allocate storage performance independent of capacity
• Manage performance in real-time without impacting other volumes
• Guarantee performance to every volume with fi ne-grain QoS settings

Global Efficiency

• Inline and post compression
• Always-on deduplication
• Global thin provisioning

Data Assurance

• Helix RAID-less data protection
• Real-time replication (Async and Sync)
• Integrated backup and recovery (cloud)

SolidFire Element X:

Delivering Gartner’s highest-rated solid-state storage solution* to hyperscale customers on their terms.

Enterprises and service providers that consume multiple PBs of storage annually can now leverage the full functionality of the SolidFire storage architecture on the hardware platform of their choice — allowing them to capitalize on their extensive IT volume purchasing power and supply chain expertise.

With the SolidFire Element X program, qualified hyperscale customers can license SolidFire’s Element Operating System to run on hardware chosen from SolidFire’s existing Hardware Compatibility List (HCL). Customers can also partner with SolidFire to jointly validate new hardware platforms, enabling guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS), in-line data reduction, complete system automation, and scale-out functionality.

The power of SolidFire on your hardware

The SolidFire Element X Program allows hyperscale enterprise and service provider customers to integrate SolidFire’s market leading Element OS software platform with Guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS), in-line data reduction, complete system automation, and scale-out functionality into their pre-existing hardware supply chains.

Hyperscale customers typically experience IT growth that is orders of magnitude larger than most IT organizations and therefore require a storage architecture that can scale appropriately as increased demand is added to the system. Element X is ideal for Hyperscale customers that:

• Experience very linear storage growth, regularly adding 10’s of PBs of primary storage per year.
• Manage extremely large data center footprints, typically five or more data centers across multiple continents, and growing.
• Have optimized their supply chain, inventory management and system integration capabilities.
• Consider IT to be a profit center.

Hyperscale customers can choose to implement Element X on hardware chosen from the SolidFire Element X Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) or partner with SolidFire to jointly validate new hardware platforms.

Meeting the unique needs of hyperscale customers

Forward thinking, agile businesses are constantly looking to maximize productivity while controlling cost. The Element X Program lets hyperscale customers do just that. Now, they can harness SolidFire software’s unique ability to guarantee performance, automate storage tasks, and scale easily, allowing them to rapidly respond to the needs of the business, improve productivity, and reduce management complexity.

By integrating software designed for the Next Generation Data Center on their own pre-validated hardware, Element X customers can:

• Rapidly deploy applications and services.
• Provide more agile and scalable infrastructure.
• Increase application performance and predictability.
• Enable automation and end-user self-service.
• Raise operational efficiency and reduce cost.

If you are building the next generation data center while consuming multiple petabytes of storage in a constantly growing environment, yet struggle with the ability to offer guarantees of performance, scale and quality of service, we have the answer. The SolidFire Element X Program empowers customers with the storage infrastructure to create a cost effective next generation data center.

Solutions:

Combine your use case with revolutionary scale, automation, and performance control

SolidFire storage systems are built on the native ability to achieve significant scale, guarantee storage performance, and enable complete system automation. Combined with enterprise applications and deeply integrated with key management frameworks, SolidFire delivers validated solutions that make your next generation data center deployment more cohesive, automated, and dynamically scalable.

Predictable storage performance to every VMware virtual machine

VMware Solutions
Similar to the way VMware virtualizes compute resources, SolidFire storage systems virtualize performance separate from capacity enabling IT managers an unprecedented level of storage control. You can now provision, change and guarantee storage performance on demand without interruption or downtime.

Making the complex simple

Agile Infrastructure
SolidFire Agile Infrastructure (AI) is a pre-validated, converged infrastructure design that has been thoroughly tested and validated by SolidFire. Built with SolidFire's all-flash storage system at the foundation, each AI design also includes leading compute, networking and orchestration technologies, which enables start-to-finish deployment of an OpenStack cloud infrastructure in less than one hour.

Automate capacity and performance allocation and enable end-user self-service

Cloud Orchestration
When building large-scale public or private cloud infrastructures there is only one choice for block storage. SolidFire delivers the most comprehensive block storage integration with all of the industry leading orchestration softwares. Each integration surfaces SolidFire's patent-pending Quality of Service (QoS) controls allowing for complete performance automation and the development of end user self service tools.

Dedicated database performance…now within a shared infrastructure

Database
Up until now, the only way to get predictable database performance has been through the use of dedicated storage infrastructure. With SolidFire's guaranteed Quality of Service functionality and scale-out architecture, all of your databases can now be run within a single storage system - more efficiently and predictably than ever before.

The most predictable and adaptable storage infrastructure for VDI deployments

VDI
SolidFire is the only storage system that can cost-effectively deliver the flexibility and adaptability required to support evolving large scale virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployments. With granular Quality of Service (QoS) controls and a scale-out architecture SolidFire is uniquely suited to manage and adapt to the mixed and unpredictable workload profiles that exist in VDI environments.

Specifications:

One array. Complete capabilities. Available with a range of performance and capacities to right-size the predictability, automation, and scalability of your SolidFire storage platform.

Each SolidFire SF-series node includes the Element OS software, the only storage operating system built from the ground up to enable the next-generation data center. 

Model #	SF2405	SF4805	SF9605	SF19210	FC Node
	Storage Node	Storage Node	Storage Node	Storage Node	Fabric Interconnect
Drives	(10) 240GB 2.5" SSD	(10) 480GB 2.5" SSD	(10) 960GB 2.5" SSD	(10) 1.92TB 2.5” SSD	N/A
System Memory/Read Cache	64GB	128GB	256GB	384GB	32GB
Raw Capacity	2.4TB/2.1TiB	4.8TB/4.3TiB	9.6TB/8.7TiB	19.2TB/17.4TiB	N/A
Effective Capacity*	5 to 10TB/  4.5 to 9TiB	10 to 20TB/  9 to 18.1TiB	20 to 40TB/  18.1 to 36.3TiB	40 to 80TB/ 36.3 to 72.7TiB	N/A
Performance per node	50,000 IOPS	50,000 IOPS	50,000 IOPS	100,000 IOPS	N/A
Networking	Data – (2) 10GbE  iSCSI SFP+,  Mgt – (2) 1GbE RJ45	Data – (2) 10GbE  iSCSI SFP+,  Mgt – (2) 1GbE RJ45	Data – (2) 10GbE  iSCSI SFP+,  Mgt – (2) 1GbE RJ45	Data – (2) 10GbE  iSCSI SFP+,  Mgt – (2) 1GbE RJ45	Data – (4) 16GB FC,  (4) 10GbE iSCSI SFP+  Mgt – (2) 1GbE RJ45
Average Watts	130W to 230W, depending on I/O load	130W to 230W, depending on I/O load	150W to 275W, depending on I/O load	300W to 450W depending on I/O load	120W to 200W, depending on I/O load

* SolidFire's Effective capacity calculation accounts for Helix data protection, system overhead and global efficiencies including compression, deduplication and thin provisioning. SolidFire customers typically achieve an effective capacity range of 5x to 10x the raw capacity depending on application workloads.

Software:

Element OS transforms the data center, addressing all five key storage requirements for accelerating IT service delivery.

Agile data centers around the world run on SolidFire Element OS, the storage operating system of the next-generation data center. Included on every SF Series Appliance, Element OS provides all the features you demand from primary storage—total reliability, all-flash performance, end-to-end security, a simple user interface, and more—plus all five criteria for delivering agile, predictable storage performance.

SolidFire Software
Scale-out  Grow with your business demands by seamlessly and granularly adding capacity and performance for each new business need.	Deploy 10s of TBs to multiple PBs Scale without disruptions or downtime Mix nodes—size or network protocol—in the same cluster
Guaranteed performance  Optimize your infrastructure by managing performance independent of capacity for complete control of utilization performance.	Guarantee performance to every volume Manage performance in real time Use fine-grain Quality of Service settings
Automated management  Set your infrastructure to automatic and respond to business demands rapidly with on-the-fly adjustments.	A NetApp Premium Bundle is included with all FAS2500 systems in the EVO:RAIL Solution and includes: Provision instantly and balance loads automatically Utilize a comprehensive API Upgrade regularly and with no interruptions
Data assurance  Consolidate with confidence using SolidFire’s Helix data protection — assurance for protecting your most critical information.	Ensure complete data and performance availability regardless of system condition or application activity Safeguard data with 256-bit encryption Protect data with both synchronous and asynchronous replication, along with integrated backup/recovery
Global efficiencies  Maximize TCO with always-on deduplication, compression, and thin provisioning that reduce storage, space, and power costs.	Increase effective memory utilization with inline compression Distribute data automatically (no hot spots) with always-on deduplication Eliminate performance impact as data is written

Additionally, SolidFire Element OS includes the industry’s deepest integrations with leading solutions. SolidFire delivers validated solutions that make your next-generation data center deployment more cohesive, automated, and dynamically scalable.

• Comprehensive integration with industry leading orchestration software, including OpenStack and CloudStack
• Simplified management through our VMware vCenter plug-In, PowerShell scripting, and integration into VAAI, VASA, VVol, SIOC, and vRealize
• Predictable performance for Oracle, Microsoft SQL, MySQL, and MongoDB databases from a shared storage infrastructure

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Documentation:

Download the NetApp SolidFire All-Flash Array Datasheet (.PDF)