NetApp Unveils Unified Data Storage Built for the AI Era

NetApp^® (NASDAQ: NTAP), the intelligent data infrastructure company, today 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, organisations are feeling pressure to accelerate innovation, unlock new customer experiences, outsmart cyber threats, and gain ever greater productivity. Many organisations see AI as a critical tool to help them achieve those goals. According to the 2024 NetApp Cloud Complexity report, organisations realise that achieving business success with AI hinges on two critical factors, data (74%) and IT infrastructure (71%). With today’s announcements, NetApp is helping organisations 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 optimise every workload. This includes integrated capabilities to optimise VMware storage costs today and provide unmatched flexibility for the future.

“In today’s AI-driven landscape, data is the fuel that powers innovation. To meet the growing demands of our customers and enable them to unlock the full potential of their data in this AI era, unified storage solutions are the need of the hour”, says Puneet Gupta, Vice President and Managing Director, NetApp India/SAARC. “The new NetApp AFF A-Series brings innovation to data storage and is designed to work across environments- be it on prem or in the cloud. With the new NetApp AFF A-Series, we are committed to pioneering advancements in storage technologies and continue to build on our legacy within this space.”

New AFF A-Series Systems to Accelerate Business Technology Operations

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 organisations 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 utilising Intel Xeon processors provide the performance and features to help businesses accelerate their enterprise AI adoption.”

Providing Powerful, Intelligent and Secure Enterprise Data Infrastructure

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 utilisng NVIDIA L40S GPUs, NVIDIA Spectrum-X networking, and NetApp AFF storage, all validated with the NVIDIA OVX architecture specification.
• 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, categorise, 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. With BlueXP classification, customers can now fuel GenAI and RAG innovation through the AIOps ability to securely and programmatically augment pre-trained models with auto-classified, proprietary data on demand for enhanced relevancy without sacrificing cost or data security.

“AI is a massive opportunity for companies to leverage their data in new ways to unlock competitive advantages,” Ashish Nadkarni, Group Vice President and General Manager, Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and Technologies and BuyerView Research at IDC. “However, as the AI market develops, how organisations approach AI may change. They need storage infrastructure that gives them the flexibility to combine their on-premises data storage with cloud environments. NetApp’s strategy of delivering powerful unified data storage that works with any data protocol, in any environment, to run any workload gives its customers the power and flexibility they need to face whatever challenges come their way.