NetApp all-flash improves data centre economics

NetApp has introduced the industry’s top-performing enterprise all-flash array and a new efficiency guarantee that give customers performance without compromise to meet the demands of the data-powered digital era.
The new NetApp All Flash FAS (AFF) A700s array delivers breakthrough performance in a compact form factor to modernize IT for demanding enterprise applications, analytic workloads and cloud integration. Customers can dramatically shrink data centre footprint and power and cooling costs due to the extreme flash density and industry-leading storage efficiencies.
NetApp also announced a new All-Flash Guarantee that ensures up to 5X storage savings, depending on workload, giving customers confidence they will achieve the capacity and efficiency that are promised.
“IT transformation is a hot topic for organizations of all sizes with a goal to put data at the heart of their businesses,” says Simon Robinson, research vice-president at 451 Research. “NetApp’s new AFF solutions offer any customer, regardless of size, the ability to deliver data management capabilities for different environments. Now any company can leverage NetApp’s AFF solutions to help them adapt to the largest and most disruptive IT shift in history.”
The AFF A700s is part of the AFF all-flash A-Series, which includes the A200 entry-level system, A300 midrange system and A700 high-end system. A-Series storage systems offer the industry’s highest scalable performance with best-in-class data management and data protection from flash to disk to cloud.
The new model continues NetApp’s track record for innovation, with an NVMe fabric-ready clustered architecture that runs the world’s number-one storage operating system, NetApp ONTAP. It supports industry-first inclusion of 15TB SSDs and 32Gb Fibre Channel and 40Gb Ethernet connectivity options. Leading attributes of the A700s include:
* Fastest enterprise storage. Based on a new Storage Performance Council SPC-1 Result, the AFF A700s achieved 2,400,059.26 SPC-1 IOPS at an average response time of 0.69 milliseconds. It is the top-performing enterprise all-flash array among the major storage providers and in the top three overall on the SPC-1 Performance list.
* Industry-leading data-center efficiencies. Total cost of ownership (TCO) is improved through a dense form factor that reduces power consumption by 11x, rack space by 19x, and support costs by 67%. Customers can deliver more than 600,000 IOPS and 1PB of capacity in just four rack units.
* Most cloud-connected all-flash array: As with the entire AFF portfolio, customers can future-proof their infrastructure with an open solution that connects to public clouds from AWS, Azure, IBM Cloud and more, while retaining maximum visibility and seamless data control across cloud and on-premises environments.
The new All-Flash Guarantee provides a workload-specific efficiency guarantee that scales up to a 5:1 data reduction ratio. Customers get the storage efficiency and capacity NetApp promises, or the company will cover the costs to make up the difference. The guarantee is available for the entire AFF family.
“Decision makers across the enterprise know that all-flash technology offers the speed and responsiveness needed to quickly extract value from data,” says Joel Reich, executive vice-president: products and operations at NetApp. “NetApp’s new AFF all-flash arrays provide even stronger proof of how our innovation accelerates results and dramatically improves data center economics. With NetApp enterprise storage, IT leaders can be confident in the performance of their applications, on-premises or in the cloud, and direct their energies to the strategic projects that improve customer satisfaction and drive growth.”