SAN storage that’s so rock solid, we guarantee your data availability

Today we introduced the new NetApp^® ASA, a family of modern all-flash block storage that’s designed for customers who need resilient, high-throughput, low-latency solutions for their mission-critical workloads. Many businesses like yours see the benefit of SAN solutions. Especially when every minute of downtime can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, or when poor performance can prevent you from beating your competition or fulfilling your mission. Unified storage is often a convenient consolidated solution for file and block workloads, but you might prefer a dedicated SAN system to isolate these workloads from others.

NetApp ASA is block optimized and supports NVMe/TCP and NVMe/FC as well as standard FC and iSCSI protocols. Building upon the foundation of well-architected SAN, ASA offers your organization the following benefits:

• Six nines (99.9999%) availability that’s backed by an industry-leading 6 Nines Data Availability Guarantee
• Massive scalability with the NetApp ONTAP^® cluster capability, which enables you to scale out ASA storage to more than 350PB of effective capacity
• Industry-leading storage efficiency that’s built-in and supported by a simple, straightforward Storage Efficiency Guarantee
• The most comprehensive cloud connectivity available
• Cost-effective integrated data protection

We understand that the applications that run your business require uninterrupted access to data—even during a planned or unplanned storage failover. A key design factor in ASA systems to deliver this level of availability is symmetric active-active operations, which means that all paths are active preferred paths to all LUNs. The following figure shows ASA A900 active-active paths.

ASA advertises all paths as active optimized (AO), which means that there are reliably active paths to all LUNs, even if a storage failover (SFO, also called a “takeover” or a “giveback”) occurs. (This is as opposed to active-non-optimized (ANO) paths.) The practical effect is that hosts reliably have active paths and don’t need to query for new paths if an SFO occurs. By using this active-active design, all ASA arrays (from entry level to high end) get failover times that are equivalent to legacy frame-style arrays, but with the simplicity, sustainability, and savings advantages of a modern data storage system.

When you’re making a decision that stakes the livelihood of your business on a new storage system, you need more than a vendor’s claim of six nines availability to be confident that your choice is right. That’s why NetApp sought independent validation from analyst firm IDC. With tens of thousands of systems in the field and continuous daily data collection, we were able to provide empirical proof that we deliver more than 99.9999% availability. To see for yourself, read IDC’s report.

With the launch of ASA systems, we’re going a step further to give you peace of mind that when you choose NetApp technology, you’re making the right decision. We’re introducing a 6 Nines Data Availability Guarantee for newly purchased NetApp ASA systems. If NetApp ASA doesn’t meet this performance level, we provide remediation. As part of this guarantee, we expect you to follow identified best practices, so be sure to talk to your NetApp representative or authorized partner for all the details. Terms and conditions will apply.

When you’re responsible for maintaining the availability of your company’s most critical application data, ASA systems enable you to plan for failover to a different site to account for acts of nature or other considerations. With NetApp SnapMirror® Business Continuity, automated data center or site failovers of ASA systems can be performed in an application-consistent manner.

SnapMirror Business Continuity uses SnapMirror Synchronous to synchronously replicate applications by using application consistency groups to manage and to replicate all application objects between the two sites. SnapMirror Business Continuity enables automated failovers between two synchronously replicated sites. This approach reduces the duration of any outage, and it significantly lowers your administrative costs associated with maintaining both mirrors and managing automated failovers. The following figure shows a SnapMirror Business Continuity topology visualization.

If you’re looking for innovative, modern data storage for your mission-critical workloads, your search is over. You can find a system where applications run very fast and efficiently, and they can fail over automatically and continue to run if the unexpected occurs. Look no further than NetApp ASA, backed by the 6 Nines Data Availability Guarantee.