NetApp Announces AFF A800, ONTAP 9.4, & New Cloud Services

Today NetApp made a series of announcements regarding cloud connectivity and AI. On the storage side, NetApp has announced an all new AFF A800 all-flash array. ONTAP has been updated ONTAP to version 9.4. And the company announced new intelligent cloud services including NetApp Cloud Volumes for Google Cloud Platform.

Today NetApp made a series of announcements regarding cloud connectivity and AI. On the storage side, NetApp has announced an all new AFF A800 all-flash array. ONTAP has been updated ONTAP to version 9.4. And the company announced new intelligent cloud services including NetApp Cloud Volumes for Google Cloud Platform.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) have the potential to transform many industries. As more and more organizations are looking to leverage this new technology they will need hardware and software to support it. NetApp is not only addressing these needs through additions to its AFF A-series and updates to ONTAP, the company is also enhancing its cloud services and strengthening its portfolio.

AI and ML needs high performance, to this end NetApp is rolling out its AFF A800 array, that it calls the first available end-to-end NVMe enterprise platform. For performance it combines NVMe with NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) to deliver quoted speeds of over 1.3 million IOPS at 500μs per HA pair. The array states a latency under 200μs and read throughputs of a whopping 300GB/s. It also integrates with AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Bluemix (IBM Cloud), and more.

NetApp is partnering with NVIDIA for the AFF A800. NVIDIA can push the processing power needed by AI. The AFF A800 helps the NVIDIA GPUs with their storage and performance needs. Since the AFF A800 can scale performance linearly, it can keep pace with the NVIDIA GPUs. NetApp is also partnering with Broadcom in order to enable Fibre Channel compatibility to its AFF A-series, bringing NVMe over Fibre Channel (NVMe-oFC) to the AFF A300, AFF A700, and AFF A700s.

Part of delivering NVMe-oFC to the arrays is done through updates to ONTAP 9.4. The new version of ONTAP also improves hybrid cloud data tiering and adds support for Microsoft Azure. The latest version of ONTAP automatically tiers colder data to lower cost storage lower TCO. ONTAP 9.4 also supports 30TB SSDs.

For cloud services, NetApp announced Cloud Volumes for Google Cloud Platform (GCP). This partnership combines NetApp’s world-class data services, backed by hundreds of thousands of customers, with Google Cloud’s leadership in application development, analytics and machine learning. Features and benefits include:

• NetApp Cloud Volumes for Google Cloud Platform is a fully-managed, cloud-native file storage service which speeds developer access to resources and simplifies management.
• NetApps automated syncs, NetApp Snapshot copies and rapid clones will support free-flowing data, allowing developers to accelerate workspace creation and build cycles.
• The service is ideal for the migration of any workload including file services, analytics, database, disaster recovery and DevOps. Now, customers have a simpler way to move data back and forth between on premises and the

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