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Outbyte Driver Updater FREEFix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesFind Drivers →Outbyte PC Repair FREEClear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsFree Scan →NetApp announced the E5500 in March 2013 as a seventh-generation E-Series storage platform aimed at high-performance computing (HPC) and big-data workloads. Its pitch centered on bandwidth, modular scaling, storage density and support—not a claim that one array would accelerate every HPC application. The headline performance figure often associated with the announcement came from an SGI OEM system based on the E5500, not an independently tested retail E5500.
What NetApp announced
The E5500 was presented as a modular, high-performance storage architecture for organizations moving and analyzing large data sets. NetApp positioned it for environments using software such as Lustre and Hadoop, and highlighted improved storage density and support enhancements. AutoSupport, NetApp’s support capability, was extended across the E-Series line in the announcement. These were product-positioning and feature claims made in 2013, not a current availability notice or an independent evaluation. The contemporaneous announcement described the E5500 as part of NetApp’s effort to balance performance with power use and cost.
NetApp vice president Brendon Howe summarized the customer problem this way: “HPC and big data customers need high performance to ingest and analyze huge amounts of data, while still managing power and cost efficiently.” The announcement also quoted Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Nagel, director of TU Dresden’s Center for Information Services and High Performance Computing, saying that the center’s new Bull-delivered supercomputer used the E5500 as the base for a storage system intended to help researchers get results faster. Nagel also credited reliability features and performance-analysis capabilities with helping the center support users; those are customer-reported benefits, not separately audited findings.
What the benchmark did—and did not—show
The performance result cited for the E5500 was recorded on the SGI InfiniteStorage 5600, an OEM configuration based on the E5500. NetApp’s 2013 technical article reported the following for SPC-2 benchmark configuration B00065:
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| Measure | Reported result | Qualification |
|---|---|---|
| Overall SPC-2 throughput | 8,855.70 MB/s | NetApp-reported result for the SGI InfiniteStorage 5600 configuration B00065 in 2013. |
| Throughput per spindle | 73.80 MB/s | NetApp-reported result for the same 120-spindle configuration in 2013. |
| Spindles | 120 | Configuration B00065, as reported by NetApp. |
SPC-2 measures large sequential data movement through workloads involving large-file processing, large database queries and video-on-demand. It is useful evidence about bandwidth-oriented storage behavior, but it is not an IOPS or latency result and does not establish how a particular HPC application would perform. NetApp’s detailed benchmark account is available in its SPC-2 technical article.
NetApp also said the system delivered more than 2.5 times the per-spindle throughput of the nearest non-NetApp published result in its comparison. That was a vendor comparison using SPC results accepted as of January 2011, priced below $500,000 and not using NetApp technology; NetApp said the comparison data were current as of March 1, 2013. It is a dated comparison, not a present-day market ranking. NetApp’s 2013 corporate announcement also reported more than 500,000 E-Series systems deployed, a historical company figure rather than a current installed-base estimate.
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How to assess the announcement for an HPC environment
The E5500 story is most useful as a reminder to compare storage against the actual data path and workload, rather than treating a single throughput number as a proxy for all performance. For a practical infrastructure comparison, examine:
- Workload and file system: Determine whether the system must serve sequential bandwidth, many concurrent operations, or a mix. Check support for the parallel file system and software stack actually used.
- Throughput and capacity together: A high bandwidth figure does not answer how much usable data the configuration holds or how performance changes as capacity and workload grow.
- Density and power: Compare performance per rack unit and energy use under comparable conditions, rather than assuming a historical density claim translates into current efficiency.
- Support and operations: Include monitoring, analysis, reliability and support coverage in the evaluation; the 2013 E-Series announcement emphasized AutoSupport and performance-analysis capabilities.
- Availability and total cost: Confirm the exact model’s lifecycle, configuration, service terms and acquisition costs for the intended region and procurement channel.
The cited sources do not provide current, like-for-like competitor results, so they cannot support a present-day ranking. A meaningful comparison needs equivalent workloads, configurations, measurement methods and pricing boundaries.
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What the 2013 news means for buyers now
The E5500 announcement is historical and should not be read as evidence that the model can still be purchased. NetApp’s current E-Series product page describes E-Series as hybrid-flash SAN storage and EF-Series as all-flash block storage. It states that E2800 and E5700 reached end of availability on August 11, 2025; that notice does not establish the E5500’s individual availability or name its direct successor. Do not treat the E5500 as equivalent to a later EF-Series model.
For current HPC context, NetApp’s March 17, 2026 announcement identifies EF50 and EF80 as systems for AI, HPC and transactional databases, with support for parallel file systems including Lustre and BeeGFS. NetApp reported more than 110 GB/s read throughput, 55 GB/s write throughput, 63.7 GB/s per kW and 1.5 PB in 2U for those current EF-Series systems. Those are vendor-reported 2026 specifications for EF50 and EF80, not E5500 figures. See the 2026 EF-Series announcement for its stated configuration and claims.
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NetApp’s current HPC solutions page describes a building-block approach to scaling performance and capacity, and names partners and technologies including BeeGFS, IBM Spectrum Scale and NVIDIA. Organizations evaluating a current deployment can use NetApp’s specialist or HPC partner routes, while checking model-specific lifecycle and support details directly.
Quick Recap
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