New AFF A-Series Systems from NetApp Transform Data Infrastructure for the AI Era

NetApp® the intelligent data infrastructure company, has unveiled new AFF A-Series systems designed to meet the demands of the AI era. These systems aim to support the most demanding IT workloads, including GenAI, VMware, and enterprise databases. Alongside these new systems, NetApp has also expanded capabilities across its portfolio to help customers leverage their data for greater efficiency and innovation.

In today’s AI-driven landscape, organizations are under pressure to accelerate innovation, enhance customer experiences, combat cyber threats, and boost productivity. AI is increasingly seen as a pivotal tool in achieving these goals. 

The 2024 NetApp Cloud Complexity report highlights that data and IT infrastructure are critical to business success with AI, with 74% and 71% of organizations respectively identifying these as key factors. With its latest announcements, NetApp is addressing these needs by offering intelligent data infrastructure that empowers customers to unlock the value of their data with AI.

The new NetApp AFF A-Series systems underscore the company’s leadership in unified data storage for next-generation workloads. These systems eliminate storage silos and complexity, providing powerful, intelligent, and secure storage solutions that optimize every workload. The technology, trusted by the top three public clouds, integrates capabilities to reduce VMware storage costs and offers unmatched flexibility for future needs.

“With NetApp’s unified data storage built for the AI era, you can drive every workload, including VMware, AI, or anything else, without adding silos or complexity. You can simplify at scale via a single data management experience for any app workload and any data type on any cloud. Simple,” said Sandeep Singh in a post on platform ‘X’.

“Data is undeniably the most valuable asset for any company to outpace its competitors. Whether it’s mission-critical applications or leveraging enterprise data to fuel AI, the data infrastructure a company chooses to run it on makes all the difference,” said Sandeep Singh, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Enterprise Storage at NetApp. “NetApp’s extensive, unified data storage portfolio, from on-premises to public clouds, makes it the go-to solution for enterprises looking to handle the most demanding workloads. The introduction of the new AFF A-Series Systems is a testament to our unwavering commitment to delivering the most powerful, intelligent, and secure enterprise storage in the industry.”

With the new, more powerful AFF A-Series all-flash storage systems, NetApp is continuing its tradition of innovation. Designed for any data, app, or cloud, these systems easily manage the most demanding workloads, from existing mission-critical apps to GenAI workloads poised to drive future success. The new AFF A1K, AFF A90, and AFF A70 systems deliver up to twice the performance, with unmatched 40 million IOPs and 1 TB/s throughput, proven 99.9999% data availability, and leading raw-to-effective capacity with always-on data reduction and a 4:1 Storage Efficiency Guarantee. They also feature integrated real-time ransomware detection with 99%+ accuracy and a Ransomware Recovery Guarantee.

NetApp’s unified data storage supports block, file, and object storage protocols and integrates natively with the three largest public cloud providers. This allows customers to consolidate workloads, reduce data costs, and operate without silos. Powered by NetApp ONTAP®, these systems deliver the simplicity and reliability that tens of thousands of organizations have come to expect from NetApp.

Christian Klie, Tribe Cluster Lead at T-Systems, emphasized the importance of robust data infrastructure for AI projects. “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. 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 of the Data Center and AI Group at Intel. “NetApp AFF A-Series systems utilizing Intel Xeon processors provide the performance and features to help businesses accelerate their enterprise AI adoption.”

In addition to the new AFF A-Series systems, NetApp has introduced additional capabilities to provide customers with advanced data management, industry-leading ransomware protection, and cloud integration required for modern workloads like GenAI. New StorageGRID models enhance the value of large, unstructured data while reducing total cost of ownership. NetApp has also introduced a new cyber vault reference architecture that combines the latest advances in secure data storage, autonomous real-time ransomware detection, and rapid data restoration, delivering unparalleled protection against advanced cyber threats.

Moreover, the latest version of ONTAP includes SnapMirror active sync, creating a symmetric active-active business continuity solution across two data centers. This ensures uninterrupted business operations during a data center outage. The updated version also includes FlexCache with Writeback, which creates local copies of data for distributed teams, reducing latency and administrative overhead while maintaining data consistency with the core data center. NetApp and Lenovo are collaborating on a new converged infrastructure solution for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and inferencing use cases for GenAI, utilizing Lenovo high-performance ThinkSystem servers with NVIDIA L40S GPUs and NetApp AFF storage.

Building on this momentum, last month NetApp expanded its partnership with Google Cloud to enhance data accessibility for generative AI and hybrid cloud workloads. This collaboration introduced the Flex service level for Google Cloud NetApp Volumes, providing scalable storage solutions, and unveiled a preview of NetApp’s GenAI toolkit reference architecture designed for secure and streamlined AI data pipelines using the Google Cloud Vertex AI platform.