NetApp AFF A250 NVMe Entry System

By Saurabh Modh, product manager, ONTAP systems group, NetApp, Inc.

Typically, when you buy enterprise storage, you have to make hard choices.

AFF A250 appliance

This is especially true with products from our competitors. Sometimes you can get the best performance, but it comes at a higher price. Sometimes you can get the cheapest system, but it doesn’t have the performance to consolidate enterprise applications or to serve data in a fast and consistent way. Sometimes you can only run SAN, and other times you get mediocre cloud integration.

NetApp AFF A250: Everything for everyone
NetApp AFF A250 all-flash storage array is a new, entry-level end-to-end NVMe system with embedded NVMe SSDs on the back end and NVMe/FC host connectivity on the front end. The array is simpler, faster, and more efficient than its predecessor, the AFF A220. Delivering 45% more performance and 33% more storage efficiency, it enables to accelerate more demanding applications, consolidate more workloads in a shared environment, and reduce the cost of your data center. It also supports some of the fastest client connectivity on an entry-class system, such as 32Gb FC and 25GbE. Built on the latest NetApp ONTAP release, ONTAP 9.8, which enhances our best-in-class cloud integration, the AFF A250 is going to further simplify data management across the hybrid cloud. All of these new benefits come at no extra cost. You can expect a similar price to the previous model, AFF A220.

Simplicity and efficiency for everyone
The AFF A250 system runs ONTAP 9.8, which continues to simplify data management with ONTAP System Manager, NetApp Active IQ, and Cloud Insights. With the new system, you can provision storage for applications in less than 10mn. It also supports single-click ONTAP firmware and OS upgrades. Active IQ now supports new security health checks and one-button remediation. With ONTAP 9.8, AFF A250 systems provide expanded cloud integration such as cloud tiering, caching data to the cloud, and backup to the cloud. In addition, they provide 33% more storage efficiency.

Performance for everyone
AFF A250 technology is the solution for virtualization and consolidation of mainstream enterprise applications (such as Oracle, SAP HANA, and Microsoft SQL Server). It also provides an attractive starting price for emerging workloads such as AI, ML, real-time analytics, and MongoDB. It’s the latest example of NetApp’s focus on helping to modernize infrastructure and meet the demands for fast, secure, and continuous data access. With the latest CPU as well as NVMe technology, the AFF A250 array delivers 45% higher performance with the lowest latencies compared to the AFF A220.

To summarize, AFF A250 is simpler, faster, and more efficient than any entry-level AFF system we’ve ever launched. To learn more about the NetApp AFF A250 array, visit the AFF A-Series arrays page.