Recently NetApp announced an upgrade to its StorageGRID SG6060 appliances through a software upgrade. Through the newer NetApp StorageGRID 11.4 software, the company has been able to increase the flexibility of the SG6060. Aside from increased flexibility, the updated SG6060 now supports scaling out, making them larger.
Recently NetApp announced an upgrade to its StorageGRID SG6060 appliances through a software upgrade. Through the newer NetApp StorageGRID 11.4 software, the company has been able to increase the flexibility of the SG6060. Aside from increased flexibility, the updated SG6060 now supports scaling out, making them larger.
The NetApp StorageGRID SG6060 is an expansion node announced a few years ago when events happened in real life instead of over Zoom. The SG6060 is a high-capacity, high-density node for on-prem use. In its original form, it helped bring quite a bit of storage to StorageGRID with a nice balance of cost to performance, with a few drawbacks. For one, if one needed more storage, they would need to add more storage nodes. NetApp has addressed this, among other issues in the 11.4 update.
The biggest benefit to the update to the SG6060 is that users can add more SG6000 expansion disk shelves. This makes the appliance easier to scale out. The appliance is a 5U unit, 1U compute, 4U storage. Now users can add one or two additional 4U 60-slot expansion shelves. As the base capacity is filled up. The main appliance supports 58 NL-SAS drives and each expansion shelf supports 60 for a total of 178 drives.
A quirk is that all drives in a shelf must be homogenous. While the shelves support lots of drive capacities (4TB, 8TB, 10TB (FIPS), 12TB, and 16TB) they all had to be the same. The 11.4 software update didn’t change this but it does allow for each shelf to be homogenous meaning users can add a shelf of all 4TB and then a shelf of all 16TB if need be, or insert any capacity. This flexibility will help as the need to scale out can be determined and implemented in the future. With all 16TB drives, an organization would be able to hit 2.8PB of raw capacity in a StorageGRID SG6060.
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