Hi everyone,

We are getting towards the pointy end of the procurement phase of an infrastructure refresh at our SME. Part of this is replacing an aging (badly) FAS2050 + a couple of DS14Mk4 shelves with a new NetApp filer.

The FAS2240-2 was an obvious candidate, as even an entry-level system such as this provides more than enough performance and capacity for our current and planned needs for the next few years. However, a key part of our upgrade plan was implementing FlashPool, and we only discovered late in the piece that the FAS2xxx series has a 400GB usable FlashPool limit per HA pair. This is/was cause for concern around whether this would be sufficient for us given a pending VDI deployment, and led to a flurry of research into alternatives, quotes on alternative systems, etc.

Where we have "landed" is that we have been quoted on two options - the original FAS2240-2 and a FAS3220*, with otherwise identical disks/software licenses/etc. The interesting part is that the FAS3220 quote is only fractionally more expensive than the 2240-2 (think 5% or so). I am being told that the reason for the close-to-price-parity is a sharp deal on the FAS3220, whereas the FAS2240-2 is close to being a fixed price / fixed margin unit.

While I have not yet verified the truth of the above (that the reason for price parity is a cheap 3220 quote, not an expensive 2240-2 quote), if we take it at face value that this is true and hence can buy a FAS3220 for essentially the same price as a FAS2240-2, can anyone think of any good reasons why we wouldn't take the FAS3220 (remembering it is overkill for us in every way except the FlashPool limit)?

All I can think of is that ongoing support / warranty will be a bit more expensive, and any additional software licenses purchased later will cost more (can anyone quantify approx how much?). I think the former is worth the cost, and the latter isn't too much of a concern as we barely use any separately licensed features now and I don't envision this changing in the future (except perhaps for SnapMirror - we may implement that).

Thoughts from the gurus? And thanks, in advance.

* we actually have two FAS3220 quotes, which are essentially the same price and spec except that one provides 7 x 200GB SSDs for 400GB + 200GB of FlashPool, and the other provides 2 x 512GB FlashCache cards. Secondary question here: for a small environment like ours that will only have one aggregate per controller, I'm thinking the FlashPool options makes more sense, but would like sanity check here - thoughts?

Cheers, Matt