NetApp All-Flash SAN Array A-Series Block Storage Systems and Ransomware Recovery Guarantee

NetApp, Inc. announced several products and programs including a block storage offering and a guarantee highlighting its ability to recover from ransomware attacks.

This announcement addresses customer challenges including increasing IT complexity, restricted IT budgets, increased urgency around sustainability, and the continued exponential growth of cyberthreats. The company’s ASA (All-Flash SAN Array) A-Series family simplifies the deployment of modern SAN infrastructure, while providing guaranteed availability and guaranteed efficiency with accompanying cost savings and leading sustainability. The firm is also announcing a ‘Ransomware Recovery Guarantee’ at a time when ransomware costs to global organizations are expected to rise from $20 billion in 2021 to $265 billion by 2031.

“In an increasingly complex world, organizations are looking for simplicity and security as a baseline,” said Sandeep Singh, SVP and GM, enterprise storage. “NetApp’s leadership in storage technology helps customers solve data storage challenges with operational simplicity at scale, built-in security to manage and recover from ransomware threats, and Flash storage backed by guaranteed efficiencies to meet or exceed sustainability and savings goals.”

Building upon the company’s history of innovation in storage, enhancements to firm’s portfolio include:

ASA – Increased simplicity for modern block storage

Leveraging more than 2 decades of storage expertise and more than 20,000 SAN workload customers, the firm is extending its leadership in NAS and unified storage with a dedicated block storage line of products, enabling customers to collapse infrastructure silos and simplify their structured and unstructured data environments on-prem and in the cloud.

The ASA A-Series is a line of SAN-specific flash storage systems that delivers performance, scalability, data availability, efficiency, and hybrid cloud connectivity for business-critical applications and databases.

Additional features include:

• Six nines data availability guarantee (99.9999%) (*)
• ASA delivers effective capacity with usable capacity combined with NetApp’s 4:1 storage efficiency guarantee (*)
• Building on firm’s commitment to sustainability, ASA delivers up to 50% lower power consumption and associated carbon emissions than competitive offerings
• Storage built on all-NVMe performance flash with NVMe/FC, NVMe/TCP, FC, and iSCSI protocols
• Continuous data access to all ASA arrays with symmetric active-active architecture typically found only on the most cost-prohibitive high-end arrays
• Storage lifecycle program, which offers customers non-disruptive upgrades to the latest storage controller technology every 3, 4, or 5 years at no additional cost
• Integrated data protection and hybrid cloud connectivity to ensure data is secure and can extend to AWS, Azure and GCP

“NetApp’s latest ASA enhancements provide more flexibility to our existing mission-critical databases and adds data efficiency at a lower price,” said Reinoud Reynders, IT manager infrastructure and operations, UZ Leuven. “The new data availability and efficiency guarantees gives us added confidence that NetApp is also the right partner for UZ Leuven as we scale.”

NetApp Ransomware Recovery Guarantee
The Ransomware Recovery Guarantee leverages ONTAP’s combination of key built-in security and ransomware protection features. ONTAP can automatically block known malicious file types, block rogue admins and malicious users with multi-admin verification, and provide tamper-proof snapshots that can’t be deleted – even by the storage administrator. With ONTAP’s autonomous ransomware protection, attacks can be detected, additional snapshots are taken immediately, and recovery can occur in a matter of minutes. Given this combination of technologies, the company will now warrant snapshot data recovery in the event of a ransomware attack. In the event that data copies can’t be recovered with help from the firm or partner assistance, NetApp will offer compensation ^(*) .

In addition to ASA family and the Ransomware Recovery Guarantee, this launch is accompanied by:

• ONTAP One, an all-inclusive and built-in storage software, is available for all AFF, ASA, and FAS systems. The company is also making the capabilities built into ONTAP One available to existing deployed systems under support.
• ONTAP May 2023 release, which improves ransomware protection and management of consolidated workloads.
• StorageGRID 11.7 and StorageGRID SGF6112, a version of the StorageGRID software with advanced capabilities for DR, updates for security and compliance, simplified user experience and more, plus a next-gen all-flash object storage appliance with improved performance and density to support growing performance-hungry object workloads with large amounts of data, including AI, analytics, and data lakes.
• NetApp Advance has expanded, growing the company’s portfolio of simplified buyer programs and guarantees, which continually evolve customer’s storage environments with confidence.

“This announcement is strategic for NetApp, but also aligns to what ESG is finding within our research, which is that the data center isn’t going away,” said Scott Sinclair, practice director, Enterprise Strategy Group. “Data demands are growing every day, players like NetApp recognize this and see the need for innovation everywhere. It’s great to see more storage options from NetApp, the leaders in File, who pioneered the Unified movement.”

(*) Specific terms and conditions will apply.

Resources:
Data storage that’s ready for the modern world
Introducing NetApp ASA: All-flash SAN array
NetApp introduces Ransomware Recovery Guarantee for primary storage
ONTAP One: The full power of ONTAP, now all in one
SAN storage so rock solid we guarantee your data availability
ONTAP May 2023 release; Innovating in security and simplicity
What’s new in the StorageGRID object storage family