NetApp announces unified data storage for the AI era

NetApp has announced new leading AFF A-Series systems that can power the most demanding IT workloads customers face, including GenAI, VMware, and enterprise databases. NetApp also released expanded capabilities across its portfolio to help customers operate more efficiently as they leverage their data to drive innovation.

In the AI era, organizations are feeling pressure to accelerate innovation, unlock new customer experiences, outsmart cyber-threats, and gain ever greater productivity. Many organizations see AI as a critical tool to help them achieve those goals. According to the 2024 NetApp Cloud Complexity report, organizations realize that achieving business success with AI hinges on two critical factors, data (74%) and IT infrastructure (71%). With today's announcements, NetApp is helping organizations excel at both factors and drive competitive success by offering innovative intelligent data infrastructure that empowers 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 relied upon by the top three public clouds, the NetApp AFF A-Series eliminates storage silos and storage complexity, providing powerful, intelligent, and secure storage to accelerate and optimize every workload. This includes 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 to outpace its competitors. Whether it's mission critical applications or leveraging enterprise data to fuel AI, the data infrastructure a company chooses to run it on makes all the difference," said Sandeep Singh, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Enterprise Storage at NetApp. "NetApp's extensive, unified data storage portfolio, from on-premises to the public clouds, makes it the go-to solution for enterprises looking to have the robustness for the most demanding workloads. The introduction of the new AFF A-Series Systems is a testament to our unwavering commitment to delivering the most powerful, intelligent, and secure enterprise storage in the industry."

"It is increasingly crucial for organizations in Asia Pacific to harness the power of data to overcome economic headwinds and accelerate business transformation," said You Qinghong, Solutions Engineering Lead, Greater China, ASEAN and South Korea, NetApp. "Backed by over 30 years of expertise in enterprise storage, we are expanding our portfolio today with the new AFF A-Series systems to help organizations to protect their mission-critical apps, unlock the value of their data and drive successful business outcomes."

With the introduction of new, more-powerful AFF A-Series all-flash storage systems, NetApp is continuing its commitment to innovation with unified data storage systems designed for any data, any app, and any cloud. The new AFF A-Series storage systems easily power the most demanding workloads—from existing mission-critical apps to GenAI workloads that will drive success into the future.

These new systems are the NetApp AFF A1K, AFF A90, and AFF A70, which can turbo-charge enterprise workloads by delivering –

• Up to 2x better performance with unmatched 40 million IOPs, 1 TB/s throughput

• Proven 99.9999% data availability

• Leading raw-to-effective capacity, including always-on data reduction and 4:1 Storage Efficiency Guarantee

• Integrated real-time ransomware detection designed for 99%+ accuracy and Ransomware Recovery Guarantee

NetApp's unified data storage supports block, file and object storage protocols and natively integrates with the three largest public cloud providers, allowing customers to consolidate workloads, lower cost of data, and operate without silos. Powered by NetApp ONTAP®, these systems deliver the simplicity and reliability tens of thousands of organizations have come to expect from NetApp.

"As we've ramped up our investments in AI projects to help accelerate our business, we needed to grow our data infrastructure to deliver ever greater performance for those workloads," Christian Klie, Tribe Cluster Lead at T-Systems. "We rely on intelligent data infrastructure delivered by NetApp to power our most critical workloads, and the increased power of the new AFF A-Series systems, paired with their integrated anti-ransomware features and hybrid cloud capabilities, will help position us for success now and in the future."

"AI is creating the biggest business transformation opportunity we've seen in decades, allowing enterprises to unlock new sources of value from their data," said Justin Hotard, Executive Vice President and general manager, Data Center and AI Group at Intel. "NetApp AFF A-Series systems utilizing Intel Xeon processors provide the performance and features to help businesses accelerate their enterprise AI adoption."

To continue its innovation as the intelligent data infrastructure company, NetApp released additional capabilities to provide customers with the advanced data management, industry-leading ransomware protection, and cloud integration that modern workloads like GenAI demand.

The new features and capabilities in NetApp's data management and integrated 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 capacity flash to provide fast object access times at the lowest cost. Customers can experience a new level of flexibility, choice, performance, and sustainability for critical object workloads with new models that offer a very competitive price per GB, up to a 3X performance increase, 80 percent footprint reduction, and power consumption savings as high as 70 percent.

• 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 rapid data restoration, NetApp's secure and resilient cyber vault delivers "logically air-gapped" storage based on proven NetApp ONTAP technology, for unparalleled protection of customer data against advanced cyber-threats.

• SnapMirror Active Sync: The latest version of ONTAP includes SnapMirror active sync which creates a symmetric active-active business continuity solution across two data centers. Coupled with VMware vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC) and enterprise databases from Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft, SnapMirror active sync enables ongoing business operations with no disruption 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 overhead. The local copies can read and write data, granting local teams greater control while maintaining data consistency with the core data center.

• NetApp AIPod with Lenovo: NetApp and Lenovo are collaborating on a new converged infrastructure solution designed for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and inferencing use cases for GenAI, with Lenovo high-performance ThinkSystem servers utilizing NVIDIA L40S GPUs, NVIDIA Spectrum-X networking, and NetApp AFF storage, all validated with the NVIDIA OVX architecture specifications.

• BlueXP Classification: This AI/ML-driven service is now available as a BlueXP core capability at no additional charge, giving users immediate access to the ability to automatically classify, categorize, and tag data across the entire data estate to deepen data intelligence, enhancing efforts in governance, security, and compliance while enabling strategic workloads such as GenAI.