NetApp introduces a unified data store built for the era of artificial intelligence

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The intelligent data infrastructure, powered by the new AFF A-Series with integrated data services, powers artificial intelligence and simplifies a wide range of workloads at scale

NetApp® (NASDAQ: NTAP), the intelligent data infrastructure company, today announced the availability of a new leading-edge AFF A-Series system that powers customers' most demanding IT workloads, including generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), VMware, and enterprise databases. NetApp is also announcing expanded capabilities to its portfolio to help customers operate more efficiently as they leverage data to drive innovation.

In the age of artificial intelligence, businesses are feeling the pressure to accelerate innovation, unlock new customer experiences, outperform cyber threats, and increase productivity. Many organizations see AI as a key tool to achieve these goals. According to the 2024 NetApp Cloud Complexity Report, organizations recognize that leveraging AI for business success depends on two key factors: data (74%) and IT infrastructure (71%). With today's announcement, NetApp will deliver an innovative intelligent data infrastructure that helps customers unlock the value of their data with artificial intelligence, helping businesses succeed on both factors and drive competitive success.

The new NetApp AFF A-Series systems continue NetApp's leadership in unified data storage for next-generation workloads. Leveraging the same technologies that the top three public clouds rely on, NetApp AFF A-Series eliminates storage silos and storage complexity to deliver powerful, intelligent, and secure storage to accelerate and optimize a wide range of workloads. This includes integration capabilities that optimize VMware storage costs today and provide unmatched flexibility for the future.

"Data is undoubtedly any company's most valuable asset over its competitors," said Sandeep Singh, senior vice president and general manager of Enterprise Storage at NetApp. Whether it's mission-critical applications or leveraging enterprise data to drive AI, the kind of data infrastructure a company chooses to run on can have a significant impact. NetApp's broad, unified portfolio of data storage, from on-premises to the public cloud, makes it the solution of choice for enterprises to meet the robustness requirements of the most demanding workloads. The launch of the new AFF A-Series system is a testament to our unwavering commitment to delivering the most powerful, intelligent and secure enterprise storage solution in the industry. ”

The all-new AFF A-Series system elevates business technology operations

With the introduction of the new and more powerful AFF A-Series all-flash storage systems, NetApp continues its commitment to innovation to design a unified data storage system for any data, any application, and any cloud. The new AFF A-Series storage systems easily support the most demanding workloads – from existing mission-critical applications to GenAI workloads that will drive future success.

These new systems are NetApp AFF A1K, AFF A90, and AFF A70, which can accelerate enterprise workloads by providing:

• Up to 2x the performance with unmatched 40 million IOPs and 1 TB/s throughput

• Proven 99.9999% data availability

• Leading-edge raw to effective capacity, including always-on data reduction and a 4:1 storage efficiency guarantee

• Integrates real-time ransomware detection with an accuracy rate of over 99% and a ransomware recovery guarantee

NetApp's unified data storage supports block, file, and object storage protocols and natively integrates with three major public cloud providers, enabling customers to consolidate workloads, reduce data costs, and operate silo-free. Powered by NetApp ONTAP®, these systems deliver the simplicity and reliability that thousands of enterprises have come to expect from NetApp.

"As we ramp up our investment in AI projects to help accelerate our business, we need to scale our data infrastructure to deliver higher performance for these workloads," said Christian Klie, Head of Tribe Cluster at T-Systems. "We rely on NetApp's intelligent data infrastructure to power our most critical workloads, and the new AFF A-Series systems are even more powerful, with their integrated anti-ransomware capabilities and hybrid cloud capabilities, to help us succeed now and in the future." ”

"AI is creating the biggest business transformation opportunity we've seen in decades, enabling enterprises to unlock new sources of value from data," said Justin Hotard, executive vice president and general manager of Intel's Data Center and AI Group. NetApp AFF A-Series systems powered by Intel Xeon processors deliver the performance and capabilities to help accelerate enterprise AI adoption. ”

Deliver a robust, intelligent, and secure enterprise data infrastructure

As an intelligent data infrastructure company, NetApp continues to innovate and release more capabilities to provide customers with advanced data management, industry-leading ransomware protection, and cloud integration to meet the needs of modern workloads such as GenAI.

New features and capabilities in NetApp Data Management and Integration Services include:

• New StorageGRID Models: NetApp has introduced six new StorageGRID models that increase the value of large, unstructured data while reducing total cost of ownership. StorageGRID can now leverage capacity flash to provide fast object access at the lowest cost. With a competitive price per gigabyte, up to 3x faster performance, 80% smaller footprint, and up to 70% power savings, customers can experience a new level of flexibility, choice, performance, and sustainability for critical object workloads.

• Vault Reference Architecture: NetApp announced a new Vault Reference Architecture that extends the company's industry-leading data protection capabilities. NetApp's secure and resilient network vault combines the latest advancements in secure data storage, autonomous real-time ransomware detection, and rapid data recovery to provide "logical air isolated" storage based on proven NetApp ONTAP technology to provide unmatched protection of customer data from advanced cyber threats.

• SnapMirror Active Synchronization: The latest version of ONTAP includes the SnapMirror Active Synchronization feature, which creates a symmetrical active-active business continuity solution between the two data centers. By working with VMware vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC) and enterprise databases for Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft, SnapMirror Active Synchronization enables continuous business operations without disruption during data center outages.

• FlexCache with Write-Back: The updated version of ONTAP also includes FlexCache with write-back, which creates local copies of data for distributed teams, reducing latency and uninterrupted access while reducing management overhead. Local replicas can read and write data, giving local teams more control while maintaining data consistency with core data centers.

• NetApp AIPod and Lenovo Partner: NetApp and Lenovo are collaborating on a new converged infrastructure solution designed for GenAI's Retrieval Enhanced Generation (RAG) and inference use cases. The solution includes Lenovo's high-performance ThinkSystem servers with NVIDIA L40S GPU, NVIDIA Spectrum-X networking, and NetApp AFF storage, all validated against the NVIDIA OVX architecture specification.

• BlueXP Classification: Now available for free as a core BlueXP feature, this AI/ML-driven service provides immediate access to the ability to automatically classify, categorize, and tag data across the entire data estate to deepen data intelligence to enhance governance, security, and compliance while supporting strategic workloads such as GenAI. With BlueXP classification, customers can now leverage proprietary data from automated classification to securely and programmically augment pre-trained models on-demand to improve relevance with the power of AIOps, without sacrificing cost or data security, driving GenAI and RAG innovation.

"AI presents a tremendous opportunity for businesses to leverage data in entirely new ways to unlock competitive advantage," said Ashish Nadkarni, Group Vice President and General Manager, Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and Technologies, and BuyerView Research, IDC. However, as the AI market grows, the way businesses approach AI is likely to change. They need storage infrastructure that gives them the flexibility to combine on-premise data storage with cloud environments. NetApp's strategy is to provide powerful, unified data storage that can run any workload in any environment, with any data protocol, giving customers the power and flexibility they need to face any challenge. ”

Join NetApp for a special event on May 14 at 9 a.m. PT to learn about the next big step forward in its unified data storage for the age of AI: https://netapp.com/

About NetApp

NetApp is a leader in intelligent data infrastructure, combining unified data storage, integrated data services, and CloudOps solutions to help customers seize opportunities in a time of disruption. NetApp creates an island-free infrastructure and leverages observability and artificial intelligence for industry-leading data management. As the only enterprise-grade storage service natively embedded in the world's largest cloud platform, our data storage solutions offer unmatched flexibility. In addition, our data services create a data advantage for our customers through superior cyber resiliency, governance, and application agility. Our CloudOps solution continuously optimizes performance and efficiency through observability and artificial intelligence. Regardless of data type, workload, or environment, NetApp can help you transform your data infrastructure to realize limitless business possibilities. For more information, visit www.netapp.com or follow us on X, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.