NetApp Releases New AFA To Improve Data Center Economics

Today NetApp announced a new all-flash array (AFA) that they are calling the industry’s top- performing enterprise AFA, the All Flash FAS (AFF) A700s. Along with the new AFA, NetApp is releasing its new efficiency guarantee, the All-Flash Guarantee. According to NetApp, this guarantee gives users performance without compromise to meet the demands of the data-powered digital era.

Today NetApp announced a new all-flash array (AFA) that they are calling the industry’s top- performing enterprise AFA, the All Flash FAS (AFF) A700s. Along with the new AFA, NetApp is releasing its new efficiency guarantee, the All-Flash Guarantee. According to NetApp, this guarantee gives users performance without compromise to meet the demands of the data-powered digital era.

Data Centers are struggling with several issues, from exploding data, to new applications that are extremely performance intensive. On top of that, footprint and power usages are of top concerns. Adding AFAs to the data center can give companies higher density and lower power simultaneously while giving them much more performance than HDDs ever could. The AFF all-flash A-Series has been around for a bit. The series runs the gamut form the entry-level, smaller A200 to the high-end A700. The latest entry, the A700s adds NVMe fabric-ready clustered architecture, 15TB SSDs (an industry-first inclusion), 32Gb Fibre Channel, and 40Gb Ethernet connectivity options. The new A700s runs on NetApp’s ONTAP OS.

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.
• 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.
• 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.

AFF A700s key specifications:

• Form factor: 4U
• NAS scale-out: 2-24 nodes (12 HA pairs)
  • Maximum SSDs: 2,592
  • Maximum Raw Capacity: 39PB
  • Maximum Effective Capacity: 155.5PB
  • Maximum Memory: 12.288TB
• SAN scale-out: 2-12 nodes (6 HA pairs)
  • Maximum SSDs: 1,296
  • Maximum Raw Capacity: 19.8PB
  • Maximum Effective Capacity: 77.8PB
  • Maximum Memory: 6.144TB
  • Cluster Interconnect: 2 x 40GbE

The All-Flash Guarantee that NetApp now offers provides a workload-specific efficiency guarantee that scales up to a 5:1 data reduction ratio. If a customer with the plan fails to get the data reduction promised by the guarantee NetApp will cover the costs to make up the difference. The All-Flash Guarantee extends to the entire AFF family including the A700s.

NetApp AFF A-Series

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