Data infrastructure company NetApp Inc. said today it’s updating its enterprise storage portfolio with a couple of new midrange all-flash arrays that boost overall performance.

It also announced some updates to NetApp StorageGRID, its hybrid cloud-based software-defined object storage service, delivering improved density and performance for customers.

The new systems announced today include additions to the company’s AFF A-Series portfolio, such as the NetApp AFF A20, AFF A30 and AFF A50 all-flash arrays. Like the higher-end models in that range, they’re designed to bring advanced capabilities to customers, including submillisecond latency and 2.5 times better performance over the previous generation arrays they supersede.

Other benefits include guaranteed storage efficiency, integrated real-time ransomware protection and improved storage density, the company said. The new arrays are powered by company’s flagship storage management software, NetApp ONTAP.

The company unveiled its first AFF A-Series systems in May, saying they’re designed to eliminate storage silos and complexity, accelerate advanced workloads and optimize for storage costs. As a unified, general-purpose storage solution, NetApp said, they’re suitable for any kind of data and can be used with any application or cloud.

They support block, file and object storage protocols, and they can be natively integrated with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, making it possible for enterprises to consolidate multiple workloads, lower the cost of data and operate without silos.

NetApp said the new AFF A20 is aimed at customers looking to start small or simply build out their existing storage infrastructure in remote and branch locations, with capacity as low as 15.35 terabytes per array. For customers looking to start small and scale, the AFF A30 ups the storage capacity to over one petabyte of storage, while the AFF A50 is said to offer the same capacity but with twice the performance of its predecessor, in a much smaller chassis that takes up a third of the rack space.

Steve McDowell, an analyst with NAND Research Inc., told SiliconANGLE that the A-Series products are an interesting new addition to NetApp’s portfolio as they bring flash storage to new segments of the enterprise. Thanks to their reduced physical footprint and lower minimum capacities, they make it possible for flash to be installed outside of large corporate data centers, in edge locations such as remote and branch offices, where it hasn’t really been practical to deploy such systems before.

“They are nice products, with NetApp managing to shrink the footprint significantly and reduce power consumption while providing a comparable level of performance to competitive offerings,” McDowell said.

In addition to the A-series, NetApp is enhancing its AFF C-series lineup, which is aimed at providing greater value for general purpose workloads across unified file, block and object storage protocols. They’re designed to provide maximum density and efficiency, with the capacity to scale. The new models include the AFF C30, AFF C60 and AFF C80 systems, and according to NetApp, they make the performance and efficiency gains realized by flash more accessible to businesses.

NetApp said customers can get a maximum of 1.5 petabytes of storage capacity from a two-rack deployment of the new C-series arrays, with benefits including up to 95% floor space savings and power savings of up to 97% compared with the previous generation.

McDowell said he is impressed with the new C-Series arrays, which bring capacity flash into a segment that has previously always been dominated by traditional hard drives.

“They extend all-flash into nearline storage, where spinning hard drives still dominate,” the analyst said. “If this trend continues, then the days of hard drive dominance might be limited.”

Sandeep Singh, NetApp’s senior vice president and general manager of enterprise storage, said the new arrays will help companies deal with the relentless growth of data volumes and increasing capacity demands of their information technology workloads.

“Customers facing those challenges can rely on NetApp to deliver continuous innovation, illustrated by the release of the new more powerful, intelligent, and secure NetApp AFF A-Series systems and the new scalable, efficient, and secure NetApp AFF C-Series systems,” he said.

As for NetApp StorageGRID, the updates here are all about helping customers to scale and manage their growing object storage workloads. StorageGRID version 11.9 delivers increased bucket counts for greater scalability, and improved flexibility with options to set up metadata-only and data-only nodes.

Meanwhile, the software is being extended to support 60-terabyte flash drives, meaning it can cater to object storage deployments with twice as much density as before.

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Source: https://siliconangle.com/2024/11/11/netapp-announces-new-aff-series-c-series-flash-arrays/