Fresh NetApp innovation to revolutionize your data center

No question—today’s operating environment requires plenty of resilience and adaptability. Budgets are tightening as economic uncertainty looms. Energy prices are rapidly increasing, reinforcing calls for sustainability and smaller carbon footprints. And there’s an unrelenting emphasis on IT modernization to drive innovation. In short, the phrase “do more with less” is ringing in everyone’s ears. No pressure, right?

As the champions for change, you must navigate these headwinds and choose partners and infrastructure that offer future-proofing flexibility—not just products that meet your needs as of today. Performance, price, reliability, and security are all table stakes. Of course, it matters what’s in the box—but the experience of managing and using it is equally important. Ask yourself: Does your storage vendor offer technology and services that will evolve with you while limiting risk and disruption? Do they have flexible options that will help you easily transition to the cloud on your terms? Are they selling simplicity masquerading in silos and sustainability that’s greenwashing?

Ultimately, in a world filled with constant change, businesses can’t afford to keep making investments that leave them in the dust when demands and market conditions shift. No one wants to (or has the option to) repeatedly go hat-in-hand to their CFO, asking for more capex. So how do you choose the best infrastructure for your needs today and infuse predictability into the investment process, while flexibly meeting your future without a crystal ball? We’re glad you asked.

At NetApp, we’ve bucked the status quo for more than three decades with unrelenting innovation. And I’m excited to say that we’re once again changing the game with several announcements that reinforce our commitment to our customers and on-premises storage excellence. As the proven leader in all-flash storage, we’re pairing the industry’s leading all-flash arrays with a new best-in-class ownership experience that will revolutionize how you look at infrastructure investments—all while delivering real simplicity, powerful security, significant savings, and meaningful sustainability. Let’s dive into the details.

I’m pleased to introduce you to our newest family of capacity flash storage systems, the NetApp^® AFF C-Series. If you want to modernize your data center from hybrid to all flash but have been held back by the uncertain financial climate, this is what you’ve been waiting for. The C-Series family uses the latest quad-level cell (QLC) flash technology that balances affordability, energy efficiency, and carbon footprint reductions to bring you the speed of flash with the affordability of hybrid storage. And it comes with the industry’s most comprehensive software suite, NetApp ONTAP^® One, that delivers multiprotocol access, data efficiency, industry-leading ransomware detection and recovery, proven data protection, and multitenancy and scale. C-Series systems will save you up to 98% in rack space and reduce power and cooling costs up to 97% compared to HDD storage. That’s equivalent to the greenhouse gas emissions of 20 gasoline vehicles on the road for an entire year.

The C-Series family is ideal for transitioning from hybrid/HDD storage to all flash; running non–latency-sensitive VMware, (SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server) database applications, and file environments; and serving as a secondary storage target for disaster recovery, backup, or tiering. Like all other NetApp storage systems, the C-Series is also cloud connected, providing the flexibility to optimize your on-premises operations with cloud use cases. It doesn’t hurt that we’ve given the C-Series systems a sleek new design representative of the innovation it’s built on.

If you’re familiar with the NetApp AFF A-Series, you know that it delivers the high performance you need for business-critical applications with award-winning speed and responsiveness. To give you even more all-flash options, we’ve expanded this series with the NetApp AFF A150, a refreshed version of our AFF C190 system that now has 20% to 40% higher performance. It features more scalability and expansion options and continuous availability across sites with support for NetApp MetroCluster IP. And it’s an excellent entry-level performance flash option.

NetApp has the only portfolio on the market with a single, unified data management system (NetApp ONTAP) for NVMe, file, block, and object storage that runs on performance flash (NetApp AFF A-Series), capacity flash (NetApp AFF C-Series), and hybrid flash (NetApp FAS series). ONTAP delivers operational simplicity for IT teams and allows you to mix systems in a single cluster, giving you workload-based, nondisruptive mobility so that workloads can be matched precisely to the right tier of storage. For long-term storage, ONTAP integrates direct tiering to cold object storage on premises or in the cloud (more on that later). ONTAP is also available on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, making it incredibly simple to migrate workloads and move data wherever you need. No other vendor can give you those options. And of course, we offer industry-leading protection and security for your data. There’s no safer place to store data than with NetApp ONTAP.

Both the AFF C-Series and AFF A150 will be available starting in March 2023.

We’re introducing NetApp Advance, a best-in-class portfolio of programs and guarantees that goes hand-in-hand with our AFF and FAS systems (including our new capacity flash AFF C-Series) to revolutionize the storage ownership experience. As your business demands evolve, you can rely on greater flexibility, improved return on investment (ROI), and reduced TCO, all while gaining risk-free efficiency and performance. Check out the full blog for more details.

• Our Storage Lifecycle Program takes the headache, disruption, and risk out of refresh cycles by offering predictable hardware upgrades, flexible trade-in options, and VIP services that future-proof your infrastructure investment. Purchase an AFF or FAS system with the Storage Lifecycle Program option, and we’ll upgrade it indefinitely with nondisruptive refreshes of storage controllers every 3 years at no additional cost.
• Within this program, Cloud Advantage gives you the option to swap your on-premises controller refresh for cloud services or hybrid cloud storage as a service (STaaS) with the NetApp Keystone^® portfolio. In other words, you can purchase hardware for your data center today and shift that investment to the cloud in the future. That flexibility is unrivaled in the industry and is possible because of our deep integrations with the world’s biggest clouds.
• Our Storage Efficiency Guarantee gives you rubber-meets-the-road solutions that don’t force you to compromise performance for efficiency. Get 4:1 efficiency for SAN workloads on our ONTAP AFF systems—guaranteed—while reducing your carbon emissions. On top of that, our automatic tiering optimizes hardware use, minimizes your footprint, and significantly reduces storage costs by easily moving cold data to lower-cost object storage. Only NetApp allows you to tier from high-performance all flash to hybrid flash/HDD systems or to the public cloud of your choice with the ultimate security and accessibility.

You’ve likely heard about our recently launched unified control plane for hybrid multicloud environments, NetApp BlueXP^™ services. As a part of our sustainability commitment, we’re previewing a new dashboard in BlueXP that will help you understand your data center’s carbon footprint across environments. Not only can you see your energy usage and associated carbon footprint, but we identify opportunities to move your data to less energy-intensive or less carbon-intensive environments. Whether you need ways to comply with sustainability mandates or are seeking solutions to offset increasing energy prices, this is a tangible tool that can make a real difference in your business’s environmental impact. Check out Matt Watt’s blog for all the details. The new sustainability dashboard is expected to be available in summer 2023.

We’re also taking concrete steps within our storage portfolio to drive sustainability goals. We’ve produced public carbon footprint reports on NetApp AFF and FAS systems that use the industry-standard MIT Product Attribution to Impact Algorithm (PAIA) method to estimate the lifetime carbon footprint for our hardware. And to make our systems as power efficient as possible, we’re taking actions that include beginning to ship Titanium-rated power supplies that can produce 4% extra power savings at no additional cost to our customers. Finally, armed with all this data, NetApp is previewing a new sustainability SLA for NetApp Keystone, our STaaS offering. Keystone will provide a standard watts/TB for each SLA-based performance level, with service credits available if those targets aren’t met. We plan for this new SLA to be available in the first calendar quarter of 2023, and specific terms and conditions will apply.

If you have workloads running on VMware in your data center, this one’s for you. NetApp has the number one platform deployed worldwide for VMware virtualized workloads on a shared NFS environment. Our relationships with the big clouds are why we’re also 100% integrated into VMware Cloud today with the only certified and supported solution for VMware supplemental datastores, which can now be integrated in Google Cloud. With this announcement from Google, organizations can scale compute and storage independently, enabling them to rapidly lift and transform their storage-heavy VMware estates to Google Cloud—without refactoring code or redesigning processes. This just adds to the flexibility and adaptability that NetApp is delivering across the board and gives you another option to tackle data center modernization if you’re ready to migrate critical workloads.

We’re excited to see these new offerings help our customers tackle their biggest challenges both today and in the future. As you evaluate storage vendors for future purchases, we encourage you to not settle for the status quo—the world has changed, and your infrastructure should be able to change with it. NetApp can give you the best of all worlds: affordability with performance, sustainability with simplicity, industry-leading security, and flexibility to transform your investments from the premises to the cloud as it makes sense for your business.

Learn more about our innovative data storage solutions.