Computerworld - NetApp today unveiled upgraded FAS3220 and FAS3250 Fabric-Attached Storage arrays, improving their performance by up to 80% and more than doubling the storage capacity.
The upgraded midrange FAS storage systems run v8.1.2 of NetApp's OnTAP OS, and can be configured with 3TB hard drives to store up to 2.1 petabytes of data in a single rack.
The FAS3220's performance was boosted by 80% by increasing its cores from four to eight. The new system can store 24GB of data, more than double the 10GB capacity of its predecessor device.
NetApp doubled the available drive slots from the older model's 240 to 480, and tripled the PCIe expansion slots on the controller from four to 12, allowing for additional storage connectivity or NAND flash cache cards in the FAS3220.
The FAS 3250 got a 70% performance boost by doubling the number of processing cores from 8 to 16. The new array can offers 40GB of system memory, up from 16GB. NetApp also increased the available drive slots from 600 to 720, a 20% boost, in the upgraded FAS 3250.
"We're going after shared virtualized infrastructures in a big way," said Nathan Moffitt, director of storage platforms marketing at NetApp's. "These arrays will be used in Microsoft Windows Storage Server environments and for our FlexPod configuration."
FlexPod is NetApp's preconfigured, pre-certified storage network for user groups of 1,000 to 2,000 people.
FlexPod initially used the NetApp FAS3210 midrange array, Cicso's Unified Computing System (UCS) blade server and a Nexus switch and VMware's vSphere cloud platform and vCenter management console.
Even with the upgrades, the FAS3220 and FAS3250 will remain at a price similar to its predecessor, Moffitt said.
Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at 
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. His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com.
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