NetApp is going to expand its FAS arrays by adding the Solid State Drives (SSDs) and 2.5-inch disk drives to its portfolio so as to increase power efficiency and speed up the data access. As of now, the company has a 4U DS4243 enclosure,  but the addition of new SSDs will not lead to any automated data movement, at least not for now.

Even if we talk about Solid State Drives from HP, IBM and HDS, etc., neither of them offer the automated data movement among storage tiers in FAS Arrays.

“In many ways, automated tiering is EMC and others’ solution to a problem they created for themselves, and [the companies] are now telling the market everyone else needs it.

We allow customers to store data on cheap and deep SATA drives and then accelerate the data that needs to be accessed quickly with Flash Cache across Unified Storage. We don’t have the problem EMC needed to solve.” said John Rollason, NetApp’s EMEA solutions Marketing Manager.

He also gave some hints on soon data motion automation. They will be providing Flash cache whose performance is at par with SSDs. The advantage of using this is that customers will not have to move data from one tier to another. As Flash Cache is an alternative to SSDs, it can be used for random read-intensive workloads.

Senior Analyst at Wikibon David Floyer delves deeper into th NetApp release, noting larger efforts to appease customers that have tired from complex, ongoing deduplication processes, saying “…increasingly, vendors will embed optimization technologies inside of storage arrays and offer compression and deduplication features as standard capabilities on primary storage devices. Those vendors that aren’t able to deliver such capabilities will fall behind.”