NetApp Unveils Enterprise Storage Portfolio AFF A-Series and C-Series

NetApp, a data infrastructure company, announced enhancements to its portfolio of enterprise storage solutions, including new models in its AFF A-Series and C-Series systems. These updates bring all-flash, mid-range, unified data storage at various price points, enabling businesses of all sizes to access advanced storage capabilities. Additionally, updates to NetApp StorageGRID have improved density and performance for object storage.

Addressing Modern Data Management Challenges

The new offerings from NetApp aim to support businesses facing challenges in modern data management, such as exponential data growth, multi-cloud environments, and AI readiness. NetApp’s Intelligent Data Infrastructure framework provides a structured approach for organizations to implement a secure, agile, and future-ready data strategy.

AFF A-Series: Mid-Range All-Flash Storage for Enterprise Needs

NetApp’s new AFF A-Series models, including the AFF A20, A30, and A50, offer high-performance capabilities at competitive price points:

AFF A20: Designed for smaller deployments, starting at a 15.35TB capacity, suitable for remote and branch locations.
AFF A30: Allows for scalable growth, reaching over 1PB of raw storage.
AFF A50: Delivers double the performance of previous models in a more compact design, targeting commercial and enterprise workloads.

The AFF A-Series models deliver advanced features, including sub-millisecond latency, integrated ransomware protection, and enhanced storage efficiency, making them suitable for critical workloads like database applications and AI.

AFF C-Series: High-Density Storage for General-Purpose Workloads

The AFF C-Series introduces the C30, C60, and C80 models, designed to provide efficient storage for general-purpose and workload consolidation needs. With a capacity of up to 1.5PB in two-rack deployments, these models bring the benefits of flash storage, such as:

- Up to 95% savings in floor space
- Up to 97% reduction in power usage
- Built-in real-time ransomware protection with 99+% accuracy

These systems are intended for businesses transitioning from hybrid flash and seeking efficient storage for diverse protocols, including file, block, and object storage.

Enabling Scalable Intelligent Data Infrastructure

With its updated portfolio, NetApp enables organizations to expand their intelligent data infrastructure at various entry points, making it easier to scale from small deployments to larger, enterprise-grade setups. These solutions provide the flexibility for companies to address evolving workloads while ensuring that their data infrastructure remains adaptable, efficient, and secure.

“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, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Enterprise Storage at 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.”

NetApp Enhances AFF A-Series and C-Series Systems with ONTAP

The AFF A-Series and C-Series storage systems from NetApp now leverage the ONTAP software, providing NetApp customers with simplified scalability through intelligent data infrastructure. These systems support mission-critical applications, manage general-purpose workloads, and offer data tiering to lower-cost FAS systems. This unified operational model aims to streamline both data management and protection across various workloads.

Modernizing AI and Data Lake Environments with StorageGRID

For many enterprises, advancing in AI starts with updating their Hadoop and data lake environments to modern object storage systems. The latest enhancements to NetApp’s StorageGRID platform enable customers to scale and manage rapidly expanding object workloads more efficiently. The StorageGRID 11.9 update brings improved scalability with expanded bucket counts, as well as increased flexibility through options for metadata-only and data-only nodes, which enhance performance for small object workloads and mixed-media grids.

Expanded StorageGRID SGF6112 System with Higher-Density Drives

NetApp is also expanding its StorageGRID SGF6112 storage system, now supporting 60TB flash drives. This upgrade effectively doubles the density of object deployments, optimizing rack space usage and reducing costs associated with power and cooling.

“Modernising our data storage onto NetApp AFF C-Series all-flash systems enabled us to consolidate our datacenters with an 80 per cent reduction in rack space,” said Oliver Fuckner, System Engineer, Open Systems & Backup at Atruvia AG. “The power and efficiency of flash storage has enabled us to modernise 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 Vice President and General Manager of Enterprise Infrastructure Research at 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.”

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