NetApp AFF A800 Review

hey guys we come to you today with a new video of another tweener this is the NetApp a 800 all-flash array and we've already reviewed it actually it was it won an editor's a choice award from us last year but we weren't doing as many videos back then so this guy missed its video chance and before it leaves it called me and it said hey yo how do I get a video and I said no problem bro we got you the 800 is as you can see a for you to controller array runs on tap just like the rest of the mainstream mid-market NetApp arrays do and in our system we had when we have six twelve plus another twelve twenty-four SSDs these are the 1.9 to terabyte class PM 1723 a's from samsung Nannette app is used samsung drives in their arrays for a very long time we've seen them in the 200-300 in this and then of course in some of their other systems we've done a lot of work with their EF series as well and very soon we hope to get some of their hyper-converged platforms and anyway the really neat thing is that these are PCIe gen3 nvme SSDs and while by today's standards that may not be so unique when NetApp started with this system last year that was very unique and not just having nvme drives in the front but also supporting nvme out the back and not just supporting and via me out the back but nvme over fibre channel nvme over ethernet you could also do regular fibre channel you can do pretty much anything out of the back of this box and you can do it all at the same time so depending on what workloads you have you could configure this for really traditional fibre channel storage or you could do over fabrics if you wanted the really high performance and in terms of performance what that means is standard fibre channel performance on this we saw something like 1.2 million i ops and almost nineteen gigabytes per second in our workloads when we went to over fabrics those numbers went up over two well over two million I ops and 25 26 gigabytes per second on the big block sequential and that wasn't even all of what this can do that was what we could do with the testing environment that we had at the time if you brought in more servers we could have got more performance out of this box so while the a300 had some nvme support on the back end this guy was the first system in the ONTAP line to bring nvme all the way through which should be really exciting to see what comes out next I don't know if it's an 8 900 or probably a 1000 to make it sound more grandiose later this year or whenever it happens we don't really know anything super private yet and if I did I hopefully wouldn't slip up on a video like this and tell you but they're clearly going to have something and should be really exciting to see what comes next again we use the 2 terabyte drives in here the 2 terabyte and 4 terabyte units are still the most popular in the NetApp systems so that's super common they do support 15 terabyte drives in this system at least they did it launched they might even support 30s now I don't have the details on that but if you think about two rows of drives at 15 terabytes each with data reduction on you could get a sick amount of capacity and performance out of this 2 controller system so we're not going to take it out and put it on the tray and spin it around like usual because it's big and it's heavy in fact the the little sticker shows four men holding this thing and I am but one man Kevin's over in the corner that's 2 we don't have the four men required to lift this it says it's heavier than 55 kilograms I don't what is that a good-sized kangaroo I don't even know so we're gonna just pull a controller out of the back we'll put that on the tray and take a deeper dive look at this alright so we've pulled one of the controllers out of the back of the system and while we do have plenty of space behind the rack this is a little bit of a longer controller so while getting it out Kevin almost pinned himself to death in the lab so we almost lost Kevin but it's ok we saved the controller and paramedics will take care of Kevin he'll be fine looking at it as we go kind of front to back of course this on this side will be your connectors into the drives in the front a series of fans it says 10 on the sticker which must be true they are easy to pull out and remove which is useful because they're gonna suck all that nice cool air over the front of the drives shoot it out the back of the system this is pretty interesting so we lift up this little door and there's the battery backup unit hold that thought for just a second when we go ahead and open up this guy to help force the air over the variety of heat sinks and CPUs so clearly there's a lot of ram in here these are 32 gig modules but what's really interesting if you notice the black tabs on this one and on this one those are micron NV dim units so before as we think about the benefits of having the inbuilt battery that's gonna help those hold up power so that when data is in flight and the system has an unexpected power loss that that battery can flush those the ram into the NV dims and everything's cool again the CPUs and then we've got our modular i/o connectivity in the back so these slide this one's a little harder of backwards okay slide forward and release this guy is got quad 10 gig and 200 gig connectivity ports and again these all connect here there's a little group where it sits in in a little cluster so those drop in there let's release this guy and keep looking at what we've got pop this one out and we've got here we've got our quad 32 gig fibre and 25 gig ports so that's another connectivity option for you and we'll go ahead and yank this one out too just for fun and here we've got it might have pulled it there we go has little connector pins that you lift up here we've got two more hundred gig ports so in all we're talking about a broad series of connectivity which we talked about before this board here powers two more hundred gig ports on the bottom these guys are going to go to your management ports USB and and management over gigabit continuing around the back we've got this little block for power supplies each controller has redundant power supplies let's just slide one of these out you know we've got twin thousand watt power supplies so that'll provide all the power again these are two per controller this is just one of the two controllers and the 4u enclosure but overall we see a board that's well-constructed with plenty of RAM the NV dims the battery backup unit 10 fans it's really well put together we showed you all the i/o modules that are available in this thing there's actually probably many more available our configuration was fibre channel heavy but again we did have some hundred gig and 25 gig onboard for data in addition to the hunter gig ports for connectivity between the controllers but overall we got great fibre channel performance we got great nvme over fibre performance you'll get all the same great performance over Ethernet the protocols as well so we had a great time with 800 that's why we gave it an editor's choice it's a great platform NetApp has been just absolutely killing it with the whole on tap series and that's not even to discount the EF you know that's outside the scope of this conversation but the EF is a great sort of no frills performance platform for flash or high-capacity platform for disk and of course the net up has the whole HCI disaggregated HCI portfolio and and will be hopefully working with those soon until then though thanks for joining us on on this not unboxing and not quite a Reebok Singh but an exploration of the 800 before we send it back the NetApp with hopefully most of the pieces intact and most of the cables that came with or at least some of them but until next time thanks

Channel: StorageReview

Views: 5,189

Rating: 4.9642859 out of 5

Keywords: netapp a800, netapp aff a800, netapp, technology, reviews, datacenter, end to end, nvme, server, tech, tutorial, hands on, how does, work, best, small business, enterprise it

Id: olJfD8l7TO0

Length: 9min 4sec (544 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 11 2020