New NetApp All-Flash Innovations Improve Data Center Economics

Provider of world’s fastest and most efficient cloud-connected enterprise storage delivers breakthrough performance with new all-flash array, announces industry best storage capacity guarantee

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Jan. 31, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- NetApp (NASDAQ:NTAP) today 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 center 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,” said 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.”

NetApp AFF A700s: Top of the Class in Performance, Designed for Cloud and Maximum Efficiency

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.¹ 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,² 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 4 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,” said 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.”

Customer Embrace of AFF Innovations Fuels NetApp Growth in All-Flash Market
The NetApp AFF series is the ideal storage array for enterprises of all sizes that need to simplify and modernize their enterprise data infrastructure. Customer embrace of the AFF value proposition— performance, simplicity, future-proofed—has resulted in 10 consecutive quarters of triple-digit growth for this product line and contributed to NetApp exceeding $1 billion in annualized revenue run rate for its overall all-flash business. Industry recognition of NetApp’s all-flash momentum includes:

• A Leader in the Gartner Solid State Array Magic Quadrant
• Fastest growing all-flash provider, expanding twice as fast, year over year, as the overall all-flash market³
• Only storage provider that can deliver end-to-end visibility across a hybrid cloud, thanks to software innovation. NetApp is tied for number one in revenue share in the Storage and Device Management Software market⁴ on the strength of NetApp OnCommand® Insight software.

Customer and Partner Perspectives

“NetApp’s All Flash FAS systems provide us with a simple and secure infrastructure to help us continue to evolve our data center while providing first responders with instant updates when it is most critical. Our 24-hour analysis captures data from 2,000 weather stations, 17 radar systems, numerous meteorological satellites, and more than 200 international data sources. NetApp helps us get critical weather data into the hands of first responders faster to improve safety and save lives.”
- Alexander Harth, head of User Support Division at DWD, Germany’s national weather service

“Speed is paramount in business today. Whether it’s delivering new business applications to employees or new products to customers, accelerating time to market increases revenues and enhances customer satisfaction. NetApp’s new AFF systems provide our clients with a suite of high-performance platforms for workloads that require agility and performance to support continued business growth.”
- Jason Anderson, chief architect, Datalink, an Insight company

“To ensure that NetApp AFF arrays deliver the maximum speed and responsiveness for connecting to mission-critical applications, organizations need modern storage networks based on Gen 6 Fibre Channel technology. Brocade’s Gen 6 Fibre Channel solutions enable NetApp flash environments to operate at 32Gbps performance and provide unprecedented visibility into virtual machines and storage I/O performance.”
- Jack Rondoni, senior vice president of storage networking, Brocade

Additional Resources

• Get perspective from our partner Red8 in this blog.
• Hear how AFF helps customer DWD in this video.
• Find out more about the All-Flash Guarantee program.  
• Visit our AFF page.
• Follow NetApp on Twitter.

About NetApp 
Leading organizations worldwide count on NetApp for software, systems and services to manage and store data. We help customers capitalize on the value of their data in the hybrid cloud through our Data Fabric strategy, data management expertise, portfolio and ecosystem. To learn more, visit www.netapp.com.

© 2017 NetApp, Inc. All Rights Reserved. NETAPP, the NETAPP logo, and the marks listed at www.netapp.com/TM are trademarks of NetApp, Inc. Other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Footnotes:

1. Source: IDC Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker 2016 Q3, December 2016 (Open Networked Enterprise Storage Systems revenue).
2. Source: http://www.storageperformance.org/results/benchmark_results_spc1_active#a02002.
3. Source: IDC Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker 2016 Q3, December 2016 (Open Networked Enterprise Storage Systems revenue).
4. Source: IDC Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker 2016 Q3, December 2016 (Open Networked Enterprise Storage Systems revenue).