NetApp® (NASDAQ: NTAP), the intelligent data infrastructure company, announced today the launch of the new AFF A-Series systems designed to support the most demanding workloads, including GenAI, VMware, and enterprise databases. NetApp also introduced expanded capabilities in its portfolio to help customers operate more efficiently while leveraging their data to drive innovation.
In the era of artificial intelligence (AI), organizations feel the pressure to accelerate innovation, unlock new customer experiences, overcome cyber threats, and increase productivity. According to NetApp’s 2024 Cloud Complexity Report, organizations recognize that business success with AI depends on two critical factors: data (74%) and IT infrastructure (71%). With today’s announcements, NetApp helps organizations excel in both aspects and drive competitive success by offering intelligent data infrastructure that enables customers to unlock the value of their data with AI.
The new NetApp AFF A-Series systems continue NetApp’s leadership in unified data storage for the next generation of workloads. Leveraging the same technology used by the top three public clouds, NetApp AFF A-Series systems eliminate storage silos and complexity, providing powerful, intelligent, and secure storage to accelerate and optimize any workload, including integrated capabilities to optimize VMware storage costs today and provide unmatched flexibility for the future.
“Data is undeniably the most valuable asset for any company looking to outperform its competitors. Whether for critical applications or leveraging enterprise data to drive AI, the data infrastructure a company chooses will make a difference,” said Sandeep Singh, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Enterprise Storage at NetApp. “NetApp’s extensive portfolio of unified data storage, from on-premises to public clouds, makes it the preferred solution for companies seeking robustness for the most demanding workloads. The introduction of the new AFF A-Series systems is a testimony to our unwavering commitment to deliver the most powerful, intelligent, and secure enterprise storage in the industry.”
New AFF A-Series systems to accelerate enterprise technology operations
With the introduction of the new all-flash storage systems AFF A-Series, NetApp continues its commitment to innovation in unified data storage systems designed for any data, any application, and any cloud. The new AFF A-Series storage systems easily support the most demanding workloads, from existing critical applications to GenAI workloads that will drive future success.
These new systems include the NetApp AFF A1K, AFF A90, and AFF A70, which can drive enterprise workloads by providing:
Up to 2 times better performance with 40 million IOPS and 1 TB/s of throughput
Proven data availability of 99.9999%
Leading capacity in the gross to effective capacity ratio, including always-on data reduction and a 4:1 storage efficiency guarantee
Integrated real-time ransomware detection with 99%+ accuracy and ransomware recovery guarantee
NetApp’s unified data storage supports block, file, and object storage protocols and natively integrates with the top three public cloud providers, enabling customers to consolidate workloads, reduce data costs, and operate without silos. Powered by NetApp ONTAP®, these systems offer the simplicity and reliability that tens of thousands of organizations expect from NetApp.
“As we increased our investments in AI projects to accelerate our business, we needed to expand our data infrastructure to deliver even greater performance for those workloads,” commented Christian Klie, Tribe Cluster Leader at T-Systems. “We rely on the intelligent data infrastructure provided by NetApp to power our most critical workloads, and the higher performance of the new AFF A-Series systems, along with their built-in ransomware protection and hybrid cloud capabilities, will help us position ourselves for success now and in the future.”
“AI is creating the largest opportunity for business transformation we’ve seen in decades, enabling companies to unlock new sources of value from their data,” said Justin Hotard, Executive Vice President and General Manager of the Data Centers and AI Group at Intel. “NetApp AFF A-Series systems utilizing Intel Xeon processors provide the performance and features to help companies accelerate their adoption of enterprise AI.”
Providing powerful, intelligent, and secure enterprise data infrastructure
To continue its innovation as the intelligent data infrastructure company, NetApp launched additional capabilities to provide customers with advanced data management, industry-leading ransomware protection, and cloud integration demanded by modern workloads like GenAI.
New features and capabilities in NetApp’s integrated data management and services include:
New StorageGRID models: NetApp has introduced six new StorageGRID models that enhance the value of large unstructured data while reducing total cost of ownership. StorageGRID can now leverage flash capacity to provide fast object access at the lowest cost. Customers can experience a new level of flexibility, choice, performance, and sustainability for critical object workloads with new models offering a highly competitive price per GB, up to 3X performance increase, an 80% footprint reduction, and up to 70% energy savings.
Cyber Vault reference architecture: NetApp announced a new Cyber Vault reference architecture that extends the company’s industry-leading data protection capabilities. Combining the latest advances in secure data storage, autonomous real-time ransomware detection, and fast data restoration, NetApp’s secure and resilient Cyber Vault provides “logically isolated” storage based on NetApp ONTAP’s proven technology for unmatched customer data protection against advanced cyber threats.
SnapMirror Active Sync: The latest version of ONTAP includes SnapMirror Active Sync, which creates an active-active enterprise continuity solution between two data centers. Along with VMware vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC) and enterprise databases from Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft, SnapMirror Active Sync enables seamless business operations without interruption during a data center outage.
FlexCache with Writeback: The updated version of ONTAP also includes FlexCache with Writeback, which creates local copies of data for distributed teams, resulting in reduced latency and uninterrupted access while reducing administrative burden. Local copies can read and write data, giving local teams greater control while maintaining data consistency with the main data center.
NetApp AIPod with Lenovo: NetApp and Lenovo are collaborating on a new converged infrastructure solution designed for Augmented Recovery (RAG) and GenAI inference use cases, with high-performance Lenovo ThinkSystem servers using NVIDIA L40S GPUs, NVIDIA Spectrum-X networking, and NetApp AFF storage, all validated with the NVIDIA OVX architecture specification.
BlueXP Classification: This AI/ML-powered service is now available as a core capability of BlueXP at no additional cost, giving users immediate access to the ability to automatically classify, categorize, and label data across the data infrastructure to deepen data intelligence, enhancing governance, security, and compliance efforts while enabling strategic workloads like GenAI. With BlueXP classification, customers can now drive innovation in GenAI and RAG through the ability of AIOps to securely and programmatically enhance pre-trained models with automatically classified data and on-demand, improving relevance without sacrificing data cost or security.
“AI represents a massive opportunity for companies to leverage their data in new ways and unlock competitive advantages,” said Ashish Nadkarni, Group Vice President and General Manager of Infrastructure Systems, Platforms, and Technology and BuyerView Research at IDC. “However, as the AI market evolves, how organizations approach AI may change. They need a storage infrastructure that provides the flexibility to combine their on-premises data storage with cloud environments. NetApp’s strategy of providing powerful and unified data storage that works with any data protocol, in any environment, to run any workload, gives its customers the power and flexibility needed to tackle any challenge that comes their way.”