AFF A250 BRINGS IT! NVMe, 100GbE, and MORE!

we're all familiar with that excitement and anticipation we get when our favorite company releases a new device am i right what about when they double the performance make it thinner and the screen is higher quality in an even smaller form factor for about the same price as the previous generation well today i'm happy to share with you an example of just that very thing hello everyone and welcome to the channel my name is nick howell and today i want to talk to you about the newest embedded all flash system from netapp if you'd like to chat with me directly about this or any other videos here on the channel i do live stream every monday wednesday and friday at 1 pm eastern over on twitch and you can find a link to that down in the description below netapp introduced the all flash fast or aff a200 model back in 2017 as a new entry point for all flash arrays delivering outstanding performance packed into a tiny 2u form factor in 2018 they improved on that with the a220 and last year at insight they launched the latest model of this family the a250 put simply the a250 delivers 24 cores of cpu 128 gigabytes of ram 8 gigabytes of non-volatile memory and 24 drive slots of nvme connected flash media all in a 2u footprint it's also very configurable and expandable but hang tight we'll go over that in more detail in a bit now if you're new to netapp the a250 provides an excellent starting point for your overall data management experience giving you one of the best bang for your buck offerings on the market today but if you're an existing a220 customer we think you are especially going to be really excited as well why while both the a220 and the a250 feature a 12 core cpu in each controller the a250 offers a newer cpu family running at 2.1 gigahertz per core compared to the 1.5 gigahertz per core of the a220 and it doubles the system memory to 64 gigabytes per controller up from the 32 gigabytes in the a220 it also has double the amount of non-volatile memory at eight gigabytes up from four gigabytes in the a220 what this means to you is from a usability perspective what this means to you is that as technology evolves so does your ability to drive more and more i o through the same form factor and in some ways continue to drive your overall cost down by increasing efficiencies how are they able to do this i'm glad you asked both systems utilize a base 2u enclosure to house the controllers as well as 24 internal drives however while the a220 uses sas ssds the a250 leverages nvme connected drives and can also scale to leverage additional nvme drives with an added ns-224 disk shelf connected via 100 gigabit ethernet a big ass from netapp customers over the last few years is that they wanted an nvme attached storage system available in the small form factor embedded space don't have the big budget for an ultra-scalable a400 or a800 but still want all that performance i give you the a250 now i will admit that there is a bit of mystique around nvme and i'd like to dispel that for you nvme itself is actually a protocol not physical hardware the nvme protocol is designed to improve latency by allowing the drive connector itself to leverage nvme connectivity this concept is very similar to changing sata adapters to nearline sas adapters for spinning disk drives in the end it's exactly the same 7200 rpm drive but the drive connectivity itself is upgraded to leverage benefits of newer technology but nick can i just slap some of these new nvme ssds into my a220 system that i already have no please don't do that they are electrically incompatible doing this could actually cause serious harm to your system to help keep track of media netapp has also changed the front of the drive carriage to a blue collar for all nvme media instead of the usual gunmetal gray that's used by our sas media please don't put nvme drives in your a220 seriously you'll thank me later with that out of the way let's shift gears and talk about i o connectivity the a220 was previously offered in two very static configurations unified and ethernet the unified configuration provided four uta2 universal target adapter ports per controller using port personalities in ontap you can easily modify each port to accommodate either 10 gigabit ethernet with sfp plus modules or copper cabling but you also had the option to utilize 16 gigabit fiber channel by changing those port personalities and inserting fiber channel modules very flexible configuration hence the name unified the ethernet configuration was simply built with four rj45 10 gigabit ports on each controller so how does that compare to the newer a250 first up are the onboard 25 gigabit ethernet ports 25 gig on board these are used for both cluster and ha communications because it is an roc v2 asic the 25 gigabit ethernet ports can utilize a better performing more stable connection than the non-transparent bridging that is used in the a220 as you'd expect you've still got all of your onboard console and management ports for remote access and diagnostics but we also included not one but two 10 gigabit ethernet ports on board for connectivity to either 10 gigabit or one gigabit switches when we look back at the a220 we recognized that having only four host i o ports on board was very limiting and to swap those out required swapping out the entire controller this is especially true when you're working with a 2u storage system where real estate on the controller itself is at a premium so for the a250 instead of putting those i o ports on board we leverage mezzanine adapters giving you much more flexibility and options for how you'd like to tailor the array to interact with the rest of your data center each a250 has two mezzanine slots per controller to accommodate various i o needs in each of these two slots you can place any combination of 4 port 32 gigabit fiber channel target adapters or 4 port 25 gigabit ethernet adapters for host connectivity in addition you can also add a 2 port 100 gig adapter which allows you to attach an additional nvme expansion shelf or you can add a four port 12 gigabit sas adapter to connect an external sas shelf in order to seamlessly migrate data on existing legacy storage shelves compared to the onboard unified utas or ethernet adapter choices of the a220 the a250 allows you to customize and configure your system with no limitations any way you see fit to close i'm excited about the adoption so far of the a200 lineup over the last few years and i feel like the a250 has just landed in this goldilocks sweet spot of maximizing performance minimizing footprint and providing some of the most extreme i o interconnectivity available on the market today as well as the flexibility to interconnect it with your data center in multiple ways make sure you subscribe to the channel for more videos coming soon and if you have any questions drop them down in the comments also head over to netapp.com for more information or you can find links to documentation and more down in the description below thanks for watching we'll see you next time you

Channel: DatacenterDude

Views: 2,453

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: netapp, netapp aff a250, aff a250 netapp, aff a250 ha system, aff a200, aff a220 storage, datacenterdude, data center dude, nvme ssd, nvme vs ssd, sas ssd vs nvme ssd, sas ssd connector, sas ssd 12gb/s, netapp ns224c, enterprise storage system, implementing enterprise storage solutions, budget nas build 2021, data storage, netapp aff a800, enterprise it, nvme ssd vs sata ssd, nvme ssd enclosure, netapp ontap, netapp storage, netapp training videos, datacenter dude

Id: qUBk56YUeHo

Length: 7min 47sec (467 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 04 2021