#FAS 2040,2240,2620,2650 can we run SSDs or Hybrid mixed?

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trail gyro
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Hello guys,
first of all thanks for this discord community. I found already some good stuff and help here.

We are using kinda old FAS systems and we will as soon our budget will go higher we can invest in a better Netapp like an AFF with NVme for example.

For now we are stuck with the following products FAS 2040,2240,2620,2650.
Dont take me wrong those have been great for the time being especially at their release but nowadays it looks different tho.

We have in total like 20 TB with all FAS System. We are running over 50 Servers (Virtual Servers) and other VMs on it.
Also MS SQL Server.

We optimized a lot but we feel like the windows 10 VMs and 2016 Server ++ are still very slow on HDD (older VMs like Win7 or 2008R2 Server have been way better).

What would you guys recommend me to do to increase the performance in general. SSD like 12x NetApp X447A-R6 - 800Gb SAS SSD?

wet prawn
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depends on a lot of things.
How many disks do you have now, how many shelf units, etc?
The 2650 I know can use SSD.

trail gyro
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DS224-12

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buoyant plover
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The 2040 is so old that it cannot use SSDs. At least not in any supported/tested way, which, given the age of the system and the fact that you're still using it might be irrelevant anyways 😉
And yes, using SSDs will obviously speed up access a bit, but don't expect any miracles.. the 2040 and 2240 are so old that they are probably not benefitting very much from the faster disks

trail gyro
buoyant plover
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hybrid aggregates (FlashPool) is something that I would only use on newer systems, as there were quite a few issues with the technology in the earlier ONTAP versions. So yes it is possible but given that the systems cannot be supported any longer, if an issue pops up, you're basically on your own...

trail gyro
trail gyro
trail gyro
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having like 500 users in network and atleast 400 are using SQL programs / tools through the network like ERP system etc.

buoyant plover
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SQL? yes. At least if it's not some sort of test DB or something very large (where performance is not required and HDDs are still cheaper). We have a 6TB database for our developers on HDDs, they do not require high speed access and it works for them, for example.
As for VMs, it depends. Of course VMs benefit from being on SSD, but some VMs again do not require it, for example domain controllers in remote sites (or RODCs), or smaller VMs like for testing, or others where most of the action can happen from RAM. If they don't do a lot of disk IO, they're prime targets to move to slower disks.

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usually our customers have multiple datastores, and if they are not sure that a new VM they set up requires SSD speeds, they usually start by putting them on HDD, and only vmotion them to SSD if they see that the VM does lots of disk IO and/or users complain

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but even that is changing recently with the introduction of the C-Series systems, as they are comparitively inexpensive, and with FabricPool tiering you can still move cold data to a slower tier. So recently, we often install 2 nodes of C-Series for the workload and 2 nodes of FAS w/ HDDs for FabricPool

trail gyro
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thanks for your input. Having flash storage in generell would be so interesting for me to see if certain system would perform way better. We also use VMs with VMware Horizon for example Windows 10 Machines and they are crazy slow compared to Windows 7 VMs on HDD

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I mean thats MS fault I believe cause when I use SSDs in a desktop PC win10 is smooth compared to HDD

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for the OS