NetApp Updates Portfolio of Enterprise Storage Offerings for Businesses of All Sizes

NetApp, Inc. announced updates to its portfolio of enterprise storage offerings including new AFF A-Series and AFF C-Series systems with mid-range, all-flash, unified data storage at price points for businesses of any size and updates to the firm’s StorageGRID, driving improved density and performance for object storage.

AFF A-Series and C-Series appliances

Today’s dynamic enterprises need an intelligent data strategy to address the challenges of modern data management, such as exponential data growth, multi-cloud complexity, and the need for AI readiness. Intelligent Data Infrastructure is a framework that empowers organizations to define and implement a transformative intelligent data strategy that is secure, agile, and future-ready.

With these new innovations, customers can now expand their intelligent data infrastructure using NetApp’s data storage systems at more accessible entry points, making it easier to scale up from a smaller starting point or expand their capabilities to remote and branch locations. These new systems enable customers to power the growing scope of critical workloads, such as database applications and AI, or tap into the efficiency of all-flash storage to manage the growing volumes of data under their control. By leveraging intelligent data infrastructure that delivers performance, capacity, and a unified framework, customers can make their data a strategic asset that enables more informed decision-making and drives innovation.

AFF A-Series appliances

The company is making the storage that turbocharges mission-critical workloads available to every customer by releasing additional models for its AFF A-Series storage systems. Like the high-end AFF models, the new AFF A20, A30, and A50 models deliver advanced capabilities including sub-millisecond latency with up to 2.5x better performance over their predecessors, guaranteed storage efficiency, integrated real-time ransomware protection with 99+% accuracy, and improved storage density, all at an affordable price-point.

Customers can build or expand their intelligent data infrastructure for high-performance workloads with storage deployments at the scale and price point that works best for them. For customers who want to start small and grow or build out deployments in remote or branch locations, the AFF A20 starts at a capacity point as low as 15.35TB. The AFF A30 allows customers to start small but scale to over 1PB of raw storage. And the AFF A50 delivers 2x the performance of its predecessor in a 3rd of the rack space to power commercial and enterprise businesses.

AFF C-Series appliances

The NetApp AFF C-Series systems are designed to deliver more value for general purpose workloads and workload consolidation across unified file, block, and object storage protocols by delivering maximum density and efficiency with scaling. The AFF C30, C60, and C80 systems make the performance and efficiency gains of flash more accessible to businesses by providing a 1.5PB of storage capacity in two-rack deployments. Customers modernizing their data centers from hybrid flash will experience benefits including up to a 95% floor space savings, power savings up to 97%, and built-in real-time ransomware protection with 99+% accuracy, lowering their TCO.

“The unrelenting growth of data volumes and increasingly demanding workloads have put increasing pressure on IT teams of any size to provide simplicity at scale for all their workloads,” said Sandeep Singh, SVP and GM, enterprise storage, NetApp. “Customers facing those challenges can rely on NetApp to deliver continuous innovation, illustrated by the release of the new more powerful, intelligent, and secure NetApp AFF A-Series systems and the new scalable, efficient, and secure NetApp AFF C-Series systems. Today, we are making our latest developments in intelligent data infrastructure more accessible for an even wider range of customers.”

Both the AFF A-Series and C-Series systems are powered by NetApp Ontap, delivering simplicity at scale for the company’s customers by leveraging intelligent data infrastructure to power mission-critical apps, run general-purpose workloads, and tier data to lower-cost FAS systems all with the same streamlined operational and protection models.

StorageGRID SGF6112 appliance

For many customers, AI journeys begin by modernizing Hadoop and data lake environments to new object storage systems. New enhancements to StorageGRID enable customers to use intelligent data infrastructure to easily scale and manage their rapidly growing object workloads. The updated StorageGRID 11.9 software improves scalability with increased bucket counts and improves flexibility with options for metadata-only and data-only nodes for increased performance with small object workloads and mixed-media grids.

Additionally, the company is extending the StorageGRID SGF6112 storage system with support for 60TB capacity flash drives, doubling the density of object deployments with consummate reductions in the rack space required and costs for power and cooling.

“Modernizing our data storage onto NetApp AFF C-Series all-flash systems enabled us to consolidate our datacenters with an 80% reduction in rack space,” said Oliver Fuckner, system engineer, open systems and backup, Atruvia AG. “The power and efficiency of flash storage has enabled us to modernize our workloads and more easily condense the physical space required for our data. NetApp makes it simple to provide the capacity and power we need to scale our environments.”

“What NetApp has done with its new AFF A-Series systems is make its enterprise-grade storage capabilities available to businesses of any size,” said Ashish Nadkarni, Group VP and GM, enterprise infrastructure research, IDC. “You don’t need to be a Fortune 500 company to access high-performance all-flash storage systems with advanced data management and protection capabilities. Businesses can now find a NetApp offering at a price point that meets their specific needs while benefiting from a single unified data storage ecosystem to streamline their operations.”

Resources:
Blog: New Unified Storage Systems Modernize Workloads for Businesses of all Sizes   
Blog: Boost Performance, Expand Capacity, and Maximize Density With the New NetApp AFF A-Series and C-Series    
Blog: StorageGRID SGF6112 Adds 60TB QLC and Enhances Features in the 11.9 Software Release     
NetApp AFF A-Series    
NetApp AFF C-Series is Capacity Flash Storage  
StorageGRID: Smart, Fast, Future-Proof Object Storage

Other announcements:

Unleash performance with NetApp E-Series: E4000 hybrid flash arrays for basic high-performance SAN storage

The NetApp E-Series product family offers hybrid flash SAN storage built for dedicated, high-bandwidth applications that need basic, fast SAN storage with enterprise-grade reliability. Coming in early 2025, the E4000 system comprises 2 configurations – E4012 and E4060 – enabling organizations to store 40% more data and achieve higher RW performance than the previous-gen. With improved performance for all applications, these systems provide simple SAN storage for backup, video surveillance, HPC, and AI-driven applications.

Resources:
NetApp E-Series product page
Disk shelves and storage media product page

Ontap 9.16.1 adds features to support simplicity at scale for block and file workloads
Introducing NetApp Ontap 9.16.1 data and storage management software, which includes granular data distribution (GDD) to optimize the performance and capacity utilization of Ontap FlexGroup volumes. GDD segments these large files so that capacity is consumed more evenly across the FlexGroup volume, which can scale massively (60PB) and distribute data across the Ontap cluster (up to 24 nodes). The 9.16.1 release adds improvements for VMware users, makes ARP/AI embedded in storage generally available, and supports up to 4-node configuration for NetApp SnapMirror active sync. Other updates include latency and throughput metrics for volume qtrees; enhancements to multipart upload for Ontap S3; an improved upgrade experience with fewer reboots to reduce service windows; and NetApp ASA A70, ASA A90, and ASA A1K enhancements.

Ontap tools for VMware releases expand protocol support and simplify deployments
The 10.2 release of NetApp Ontap tools for VMware adds NVMe for VMFS datastores, supporting all protocols for VMFS. Additionally, ONTAP tools extend the vCenter UI, giving VM administrators an easy way to configure vSphere Metro Storage Cluster based on NetApp SnapMirror active sync. Early access to release 10.3 has started, with GA in December. This release will support and simplify VMware deployments for the new ASA A-series (the A1K, A90, A70).

Streamlined Cloud Volumes Ontap Freemium deployment: Try hybrid cloud use cases with ease on Azure Marketplace
NetApp is offering a streamlined deployment experience for Cloud Volumes Ontap Freemium through the Azure Marketplace. This deployment method lets users set up a new instance in under 10 minutes and eliminates the need for a connector. It provides a simpler, friendlier try-and-buy experience for setting up a Cloud Volumes Ontap Freemium instance in Azure for early-stage hybrid cloud customers.

Resources:
Blog: Rapid Cloud Volumes Ontap Setup in Azure Expedites Customer Onboarding    
Cloud Volumes ONTAP for Azure product page

NetApp Trident 24.10: Enabling NetApp storage for Kubernetes
NetApp Trident 24.10 provides the advanced data management and protection capabilities of NetApp Ontap for Kubernetes applications. The solution offers all the capabilities of NetApp Astra, delivered as Kubernetes-native services at no extra cost. It improves application uptime, prevents data loss, and enables application-aware portability for DR and business continuity. With this update, the company advances Trident as an industry-leading storage solution for Kubernetes applications, providing robust data management and protection features for both on-premises and cloud environments.

Additionally, Google Cloud NetApp Volumes now supports persistent storage for Kubernetes deployments using NetApp Trident. With Trident support, customers can easily provision, orchestrate, and attach persistent volumes (PVs). Trident supports applications on Google Kubernetes Engine, OpenShift Dedicated, and self-managed Kubernetes clusters served from Google Cloud NetApp Volumes storage pools.

BlueXP ransomware protection adds advanced workload defense and new features
NetApp BlueXP ransomware protection has new advanced features and integrations. This update, from the company that makes the planet’s most secure storage, adds cyber resilience features like AI-driven data classification, user behavior anomaly detection via an integration with Data Infrastructure Insights Storage Workload Security, and a new SIEM integration with Microsoft Sentinel.

Added to BlueXP workload factory: New capabilities and workload support, plus integration with BlueXP unified control plane
NetApp BlueXP workload factory has new enhancements to help customers optimize the operation of key workloads running on Amazon FSx for Ontap . The technology is integrated in the BlueXP UI, which includes workload support for builders, PostgreSQL databases, SQL drift management, and built-in data guardrails (powered by BlueXP classification) to keep PII out of RAG application results. BlueXP workload factory adheres to industry and vendor best practices for the design, setup, and operation of workloads such as GenAI, VMware, and databases, as well as general-purpose storage workloads.

BlueXP updates: Workload factory integration with BlueXP console
NetApp BlueXP unifies control and simplifies the process of managing an organization’s intelligent data infrastructure. BlueXP workload factory is fully integrated and available through the BlueXP console, enabling customers to optimize and automate workloads to streamline operations through a single point of control.

Resource:
Blog: New unified storage systems modernize workloads for businesses of all sizes