New end-to-end NetApp NVMe product announced

NetApp has announced the NetApp EF600 series -- a product designed to enable companies to quickly develop new insights for performance-sensitive workloads.

The EF600 series is an end-to-end non-volatile memory express (NVMe) midrange product that aims to quicken access to data. According to NetApp, organizations want ways to improve speed and responsiveness of the applications they use for important business operations. NetApp claims the EF600 series does just that by doubling the performance of currently available all-flash arrays using the SAS protocol.

Key specs of the EF600 all-flash array include delivering 2 million sustained IOPS, response times under 100 microseconds and 44 GBps of throughput. Other features include the following:

• NVMe/IB, NVMe/RoCE and NVME/FC support, which provides low latency and better investment protection
• Redundant components with automated failover
• Storage management with tuning functions
• Full-function NetApp SANtricity Web Services embedded REST API
• Monitoring and diagnostics with proactive repair
• NetApp SANtricity Snapshot capability, volume copy and Dynamic Disk Pools

This is NetApp's first end-to-end NVMe EF system. Its EF570 system was NVMe from the server but did not extend to the drives. The EF600 also uses NVMe solid-state drives.

The NVMe market continues to increase in popularity, with start-ups such as Qumulo introducing all-flash and hybrid arrays in June. It also included a system built for the NVMe storage protocol.

Earlier this month, Amazon acquired E8 Storage, another NVMe flash startup, signaling the continued interest in NVMe flash. This comes on the heels of Google buying file storage software startup Elastifile, and StorCentric acquiring NVMe array startup Vexata.

The NetApp NVMe offering competes with other NVMe products such as from Pure Storage and Broadberry. Among its NVMe products, Broadberry offers the CyberStore Performance range, which has more than 2 million IOPS as well.