The technology of NVMe SSDs is advancing quickly, aiming to replace SATA, SAS, and traditional Solid State Disk drives. It appears that the introduction of Capacity NVMe Flash(QLC SSD) will eventually replace all existing SATA and SAS-based Storage Arrays. Many storage array providers are marketing and selling their Capacity NVMe Flash-based array models at prices almost equivalent to SAS/SATA-based arrays.
So, what is NetApp's approach in response to this trend?
NetApp is going with the same trend as per the discussions with the NetApp representatives I met.
But the capacity drives, especially QLC, will lead to a slight performance degrade. There should be a way to mix QLC+SLC disks for a better performance.
@Manjunath V well, if you take a 4-node cluster with an A-Series and a C-Series (e.g. filled with the new 60+TB drives) and FabricPool from the A-Series, you'll get exactly that: Cold data being stored cheaper but slower on the QLC drives.
Whatever "cold" means, can be defined per volume (2-183 days of no access, only snapshots, ...)
That's the way...
I don't work for Netapp, but I work a lot with NetApp and purchasing.
The trend from Netapp is the same. They are starting to move away from SATA/SAS/NL disks, although I don't think they will go away completely for a long time.
The whole Netapp AFF Cxxx-series is capacity NVMe and is sold at a much cheaper price than the AFF Axxx-series, but not on the level of the FAS-series.
$/GB and/or ROI of the C-series is quite good I would say and the performance is far beyond the FAS-series.