Hi everyone,
I’m preparing an internal presentation on NetApp’s product lineup and future direction.
I’ve heard that NetApp might be phasing out SAS-based drives and shifting toward SSD or NVMe solutions across platforms like FAS and AFF.
This is quite important for us since our sales strategy toward customers will depend on NetApp’s future direction and roadmap.
Could anyone share any (publicly shareable) insights on this transition or the broader roadmap for NetApp’s storage lineup — for example, AFF C-Series, A-Series, FAS ?
#Product lineup and future direction
pallid locust
mental nimbus
SAS-based drives (10k and/or 15k, 2.5") don't have any future. There simply is no demand and there are no suppliers innovating or providing bigger capacities.
But NL-SAS with 3.5" is very much alive and not going away. Latest capacity with NetApp is 24TB but you can find drives with 30TB and more. There's innovation going on with HAMR & MAMR - TB/$ wise HDDs are still cheaper than comparable QLC drives. Might change in the coming years with PLC SSDs and whatnot.
But I'm aware of any NetApp announcement of going all-flash-only in the near future.
If we are talking about SAS-based SSDs they might go away, that certainly might he possible. There is no real reason to use them since NVMe-based SSDs provide so many improvements especially with latency. Only "drawback" is the higher power-consumption need of NVMe-shelves but there's no way around that if you want that - 100Gb needs more oomph than 12Gb SAS.
pallid locust
SAS-based drives (10k and/or 15k, 2.5") don't have any future. There simply is n...
So does that mean the FAS series will gradually be phased out, with the lineup shifting more toward AFF?
Or does it mean only SAS-based drives are being phased out while FAS still remains a key lineup?
mental nimbus
None of the above. That's not what I was saying.
FAS will remain and so do capacity disks aka bigger 3.5" NL-SAS based HDDs.
I was only talking about 2.5" HDDs and also nothing official official from NetApp. But don't expect to get many (or any) bigger 2.5" capacities in FAS systems.