NetApp’s flagship unified storage platform is the All Flash FAS or AFF, the A-Series is different from the C-Series in that it addresses TLC flash vs the C-Series’ QLC.
Today, Tuesday May 14, 2024 NetApp has announced three new AFF A-Series models, the A70, A90 and A1K which will likely supplant the A400, A800 and A900 respectively, are here they are:
What’s interesting about these latest models is that they are all basically the same but with different RAM and CPU complements, the A1K does differentiate itself in that it is a return to a single-node chassis design whereas the A70 and A90 reuse the chassis from the A800, with a slight upgrade I’ll get to at the end of this article. Upgrading from an A800 to an A90 is a PCM-swap and not an entire chassis swap.
The new platform is a serious upgrade in the IO department, with nine usable PCIe 5.0 slots available per controller, up from five PCIe 3.0 on the A400 and A800 but down slightly from the A900’s ten PCIe 4.0 IO modules. PCIe 4.0 doubled the available bandwidth of PCIe 3.0 per PCIe lane and PCIe 5 doubled it again, bringing available lane bandwidth up to ~4GB/s. Up until this release, all existing controllers used a switched PCIe architecture but now, direct access to the bus is available to all slots. These improvements pave the way for faster PCIe cards such as quad port, 64G FC cards and dual port, 200GbE and 400GbE Ethernet adapters but be sure to pay attention to the slot priority assignment if you’re putting the card in yourself. Slots 2,3,9 and 10 have eight lanes vs sixteen on 1,4-8 and 11; all eleven slots on the A1K have sixteen lanes.
Powering these new controllers will be Intel’s 4th generation Xeon Scalable processors with QuickAssist Technology (QAT) allowing for integrated compression offload. Current platforms perform inline compression in 8K chunks and a scanner would perform compression on cold data in 32k chunks, QAT allows for inline compression at 32k chunks all without any performance impact. Any data moved to a QAT-enabled controller, or on controllers upgraded to QAT-enabled models will realize this efficiency improvement. However, if data is moved from a QAT-enabled controller to an older, non-QAT model, that efficiency goes away. Speaking of older models, all controller upgrades are non-disruptive and the A800 is an in-chassis upgrade. I have to wonder if NetApp has any plans to use the other accelerators available in this CPU, specifically DLB and IAA.
Have a look at the raw numbers, I’m not sure how scientific my aggregated GHz column is, but I find it helpful when comparing horsepower. I’ve included the existing A400, A800 and A900 to see where the new models land.
Model | MAX Drives | Internal Drives | CPU Speed | CPU/Node | Cores/CPU | Aggr GHz | NVRAM | RAM |
A400 | 480 | N/A | 2.2GHz | 2 | 10 | 44GHz | 16GB | 128GB |
A70 | 240 | 48 | 2.0GHz | 2 | 16 | 64GHz | 32GB | 128GB |
A800 | 240 | 48 | 2.1GHz | 2 | 24 | 100.8GHz | 32GB | 640GB |
A90 | 240 | 48 | 2.0GHz | 2 | 32 | 128GHz | 64GB | 1024GB |
A900 | 480 | N/A | 2.2GHz | 2 | 32 | 140.8GHz | 64GB | 1024GB |
A1K | 480 | N/A | 1.7GHz | 2 | 52 | 176.8GHz | 64GB | 1024GB |
As for performance improvement expectations, NetApp claims the following:
- A70 provides 2x the performance of the A400
- A90 provides 1.6x the performance of the A800
- A1K provides 1.4x the performance of the A900
While this article covers the new A-Series, up until today the C-Series have been the exact same controllers, differing only in their ability to address TLC media vs the C-Series’ QLC media. Having said that, I’ve become a big fan of the C800 for performance and form factor. Since the A70 and A90 reuse the x800 chassis, that means the ability to stick 48 internal drives in it. With the current max drive sizes for the A800 and C800 being 15.3TB and 30.7TB respectively, they can provide up to 570TiB and 1.11PiB of usable space, all in 4RU of rack space; this is before taking into account ONTAP’s aggressive data efficiency capabilities. All three of the new models are described as having a max raw capacity of 3.7PB which means 240×15.3TB so no 30.7TB TLC media at this time.
Today’s announcement has the A-series properly differentiating itself from it’s C-series sibling; however, I can’t imagine the C-series wouldn’t get some sort of QAT-related update soon, but I guess we’re going to have to wait on that for now.
Last but not least, if you’re a fan of the new bezels we’ve been seeing, you’ll be happy to hear that NetApp has finally acquiesced to our demands that the NetApp logo light up. That’s right, the three new models all get a fancy light up bezel that can be controlled via the GUI, CLI or even API, sadly they are one-colour LEDs and not RGBW…at least not yet. If you have an existing A800 and you perform an in-chassis upgrade, you will not benefit from this one as the pre-existing chassis lack the requisite 8-pin connector to the bezel.
These new models have NetApp seriously improving their offering, first by beefing up the basic CPU/RAM components but also around the physical design and architecture, the modular nature of which is very interesting.