Just a couple of weeks ago virtualization.info announced that Cisco selected Rent-A-Lab (RAL) to host all Unified Computing System (UCS) road shows and bootcamps arranged in Europe for this year. But there’s much more happening at our busy on-demand data center in Zurich.
Today we are happy to announce that NetApp joined the list of prestigious sponsors that are powering RAL.
Thanks to NetApp, the infrastructure now features two FAS3140v arrays, each with four 4GB FCP ports, six 1GB NICs, one dual-CNA for FCoE and 10GB Ethernet, and one Performance Acceleration Module (PAM) II with 256GB of SLC flash memory.
The PAM II (aka Flash Cache) is an array controller resident, intelligent 3/4 length PCIe card with onboard memory that is used as a read cache and is integrated with DataONTAP via FlexScale which is software that provides various tuning options and modes of operation.
It’s a especially desirable component in VDI environments and we can’t wait to try it with the virtualization platforms we have here.
The two arrays come each with a grand total of 24 300GB SAS 15K RPM drives and a boatload of software: ASIS, CIFS, Cluster, FCP, Flex Clone, iSCSI, Multistore, NearStore Option, NFS, pammii, snapdrive_windows, snapmanager_hyperv, SnapMirror, SnapRestore, SnapVault ONTAP Primary, SnapVault ONTAP Secondary, V-Series (Gateway).
The last feature, V-Series, which defines the “v” in the FAS3140v name, means that these units are able to manage 3rd party arrays (from IBM, HP, HDS, EMC, Fujitsu and 3PAR) and put their storage intelligence on top.
On the side you can see a picture of the new gear already in place in the virtualization.info Rent-a-Lab racks.