Why choose NetApp AFF A-Series
NetApp® AFF A-Series All-Flash Arrays are smart, Xeon, Xeon solutions that leverage modern cloud technologies to give your Data Fabric the speed, efficiency, and security you need.
It's time to modernize your data
The fundamental first step in any IT transformation is to modernize your infrastructure with high-performance all-flash storage that improves the speed and responsiveness of business-critical applications. New workloads such as data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and deep learning (DL) require extreme performance that first-generation flash systems couldn't deliver. In addition, adopting a "cloud first" strategy raises the need for enterprise-grade data services across shared environments across data centers and the cloud. Your all-flash array must deliver powerful data services, integrated data protection, seamless scalability and higher levels of performance, and deep integration of applications and the cloud.
NetApp AFF A-Series all-flash storage arrays are the answer
Powered by NetApp ONTAP® data management software, NetApp®® AFF A-Series systems deliver the industry's highest performance, superior flexibility, and best-in-class data services, as well as cloud integration to help you accelerate the delivery, management, and protection of business-critical data in a hybrid cloud.
Organizations ranging from large enterprises to midsize enterprises rely on the AFF A-Series to achieve the following goals:
· Streamline operations with seamless data management on-premises and in the cloud.
· Accelerate traditional and next-generation applications.
· Ensure that business-critical data is always available, protected, and secure.
Accelerate applications and build future-proof infrastructure
In the modern data center, IT is tasked with delivering maximum performance for business-critical workloads, non-disruptively scaling as the business grows, and helping business units implement new data-driven initiatives. The AFF A-Series system makes it all easy for you.
Deliver the highest performance for the most demanding applications
AFF A-Series systems deliver industry-leading performance validated against SPC-1 and SPEC SFS industry benchmarks, making them ideal for demanding, transactional applications such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, MongoDB databases, VDI, and server virtualization.
With the power of front-end NVMe/FC and NVMe/TCP host connectivity and back-end NVMe connectivity SSDs, our high-end AFF A900 system reduces latency to 100 microseconds. The A900 is designed for high resiliency, high RAS, and can be upgraded nondisruptively from the chassis of its predecessor, the A700. The A800's compact form factor and outstanding performance make it ideal for EDA and media and entertainment workloads. The most diverse midrange AFF A400 systems use hardware acceleration technology to dramatically improve performance and storage efficiency. Our entry-level, budget-friendly AFF A250 improves performance by 40% and efficiency by up to 33% compared to its predecessor at no additional cost. In addition, the AFF A-Series allows you to:
· Accelerate mission-critical SAN workloads with symmetric active-active host connectivity for continuous availability and instant failover.
· Consolidate workloads to deliver up to 14.4 million IOPS with 1 millisecond latency in clusters with a truly unified scale-out architecture. Built-in Adaptive Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities ensure that SLAs are met in multi-workload and multi-tenant environments.
· Use a single namespace to manage massively scalable NAS containers (up to 20 PB and 400 billion files).
· Increase collaboration speed and efficiency across multiple locations and increase data throughput for read-intensive applications with NetApp FlexCache® software.
Modernize with advanced connectivity
AFF A-Series all-flash systems deliver industry-leading performance, density, scalability, security, and network connectivity. As the first enterprise-class storage system to support both NVMe/TCP and NVMe/FC, the AFF A-Series systems improve performance with modern network connectivity. With NVMe/TCP (using the usual Ethernet infrastructure), you can take advantage of faster host connections without investing in new hardware. With NVMe/FC, you get twice as much IOPS and cut application response time in half compared to traditional FCs. These systems feature storage path failover capabilities and support a broad ecosystem including VMware, Microsoft Windows 10, and Linux. Integrating NVMe/FC into an existing SAN is a simple, nondisruptive software upgrade process for most customers.
Nondisruptive scaling
With the AFF A-Series, you can integrate new technologies and private or public clouds into your infrastructure without disruption. The AFF A-Series is the only all-flash array that allows you to combine different controllers, different sizes of SSDs, and new technologies to effectively protect your investment. NVMe-based AFF systems also support SAS SSDs, maximizing the flexibility and cost-effectiveness of upgrades.
Improve operational efficiency
IT departments are trying to make budgets work harder and help IT staff focus on new value-added projects rather than wasting time on day-to-day IT management. AFF systems simplify IT operations, reducing data center costs. In particular, our entry-level system, the AFF A250, delivers best-in-class performance and efficiency to midsize business customers, enabling them to consolidate more workloads and eliminate silos.
It only takes a few minutes to complete the storage configuration
The NetApp AFF system provides broad application ecosystem support and deep integration for enterprise applications, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), database, and server virtualization for Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, VMware, SAP, MySQL, and more. You can leverage NetApp ONTAP System Manager to quickly configure storage in less than 10 minutes. In addition, infrastructure management tools simplify and automate common storage tasks so you can:
· Easily configure and rebalance workloads by monitoring clusters and nodes.
· Use one-click automation and self-service for configuration and data protection.
· Upgrade the operating system and firmware with just one click
· Import LUNs directly from third-party storage arrays into the AFF system for seamless data migration.
In addition, the NetApp® Active IQ® Digital Advisor Engine enables you to optimize your NetApp system with predictive analytics and proactive support. Driven by NetApp's vast customer base, AI and machine learning generate guiding insights to help you prevent problems, optimize configurations, save time, and make more informed decisions.
Significant savings in storage
NetApp uses a variety of features to optimize capacity, promote savings, and help you lower your total cost of ownership. AFF A-Series systems support solid-state drives (SSDs) with multi-stream write technology, combined with advanced SSD partitioning capabilities, to provide maximum usable capacity regardless of the type of data you store. Thin provisioning, NetApp Snapshot™ copies, and real-time data refinement features such as deduplication, data compression, and data reduction save significant additional space without compromising performance, allowing you to purchase as little storage capacity as possible.
Easily build a hybrid cloud
NetApp-built Data Fabric helps you simplify and integrate data management between the cloud and on-premises environments to meet business needs and gain a competitive edge. With the AFF A-Series, you can connect to more clouds and get more data services while achieving data tiering, caching, and disaster recovery. In addition, you can:
· Maximize performance and reduce overall storage costs by automatically tiering cold data to the cloud by using FabricPool.
· Deliver data on the fly to support efficient collaboration in a hybrid cloud
· Protect your data by leveraging Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) cloud resources in both on-premises environments and the public cloud.
· Improve read performance for data that is widely shared across the enterprise and across hybrid cloud deployments.
Ensure that your data is always available, protected, and secure
Businesses are increasingly dependent on data, so the impact of data loss on the business can be increasing and costly. IT must protect data from internal and external threats, ensure data availability, avoid interruptions in maintenance, and recover quickly from failures.
Integrated data protection
The AFF A-Series system comes with integrated data protection software that is consistent with a full suite of award-winning NetApp applications. Key features include:
· Save native space with clones and Snapshot replicas, reducing storage costs and minimizing the impact on performance. Supports up to 1,023 replicas.
· NetApp® SnapCenter® software simplifies application management by providing application-consistent data protection and cloning management.
· With NetApp® SnapMirror® technology, data can be replicated to any NetApp FAS or AFF system on-premises or in the cloud, reducing overall system costs.
Business continuity and rapid disaster recovery
With AFF, you can achieve zero data loss and zero downtime, ensuring that data is always available. NetApp MetroCluster™ software provides synchronous replication to protect the entire system, while NetApp SnapMirror business continuity provides more flexible and cost-effective business continuity, even when more granular replication of selected critical data.
Security is everywhere
Flexible encryption and key management help you protect sensitive data on-premises, in the cloud, and in transit. Market-leading anti-ransomware protection for both preemption and post-attack recovery protects your critical data from ransomware attacks and prevents catastrophic financial consequences. With these simple and efficient security solutions, you can:
· Achieve FIPS 140-2 compliance (Level 1 and Level 2) using self-encrypting drives and any type of drive based on software encryption.
· Meet regulatory, risk, and compliance requirements with security features such as security cleanup, logging and audit monitoring, and write-once, read-many (WORM) file locking.
· Protect against threats with multi-factor authentication, role-based access control, secure multi-tenancy, and storage-grade file security.
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