When we first heard rumors about NetApp releasing a “slim” model of their beast of an all-flash array the “A700”, the storage nerd community were completely giddy with anticipation. When we had heard that NetApp was planning on putting all the power of the their 8U Modular A700 workhorse into a compact 4U chassis with 24 internal drive bays, we thought that NetApp couldn’t possible pull this off. However, today NetApp pulls the covers off the “A700s”, and yes the “s” does officially stand for slim. Let’s see how they did:

The Hardware:

Processor: CPU: 72 cores (same core count as AFF A700)

Memory: 1024GB (same amount as AFF A700)

Onboard I/O ports (per controller): 4x 40GbE QSFP ports with 4 PCIe Expansion slots

Front View of the 4U Chassis with the bezel on and off:

Rear View Single Controller View:

Full Rear Dual Controller with Option I/O Cards:

Supported SSD Types and Sizes at Launch

Internal SSDs: 12 or 24 drives drive configurations are supported. The max drive count supported is 216.

Non-Full Disk Encrypting SSDs: 960GB, 3.8TB, 15.3TB

Disk Encrypting SSDs: 800GB, 3.8TB

Performance

Ok, let’s get to what you’ve been waiting for: How fast is this box? In a word, it’s a MONSTER! Check out these numbers:

Performance numbers relative to the previous gen top of the line FAS8080:

For those of you not paying attention, that’s roughly 500,000 Oracle 12c IOPs at .6ms latency. In a 4U chassis. Oh yeah, and toss in some 15.3TB IOPs and you’re looking at a box that has about a PB of effective storage as well *In a 4U chassis*. Whoa.

Oh yeah these can be clustered together and scale out. What does a fully scaled FC cluster look like? Well NetApp just publish an official SPC-1 benchmark on a 12-node (6-chassis) cluster. Check this out:

12-node AFF A700s SAN cluster achieves 2.4 million IOPS at 0.69 ms latency!

This just happens to be the lowest $/SPC-1 IOPS, and number 1 in response time among All Flash results.

Check out the Full report here on the SPC-1 Benchmark: http://www.storageperformance.org/results/benchmark_results_spc1_active#a02002

What do you think of the new array? Let’s continue the discussion in the comments. Thanks!