Why NetApp AFF A-Series

A fundamental first step in undertaking any IT transformation is to modernize your infrastructure with high performance all-flash storage to improve speed and responsiveness for critical business applications. New workloads, such as data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and deep learning (DL), demand extreme performance that first-generation flash systems can’t deliver. Additionally, adopting a “cloud first” strategy drives the need for enterprise-grade data services for a shared environment across your data center and the cloud. Your all-flash arrays must provide robust data services, integrated data protection, seamless scalability, and new levels of performance, as well as deep application and cloud integration.

Powered by NetApp^® ONTAP^® data management software, NetApp^® AFF A-Series systems deliver the industry’s highest performance, superior flexibility, and best-in-class data services and cloud integration to help you accelerate, manage, and protect business-critical data across your hybrid cloud.

A wide range of organizations, from enterprise to midsize businesses, rely on AFF A-Series to:

• Simplify operations with seamless data management, on the premises and in the cloud.
• Accelerate traditional and new-generation applications.
• Keep business-critical data available, protected, and secure.

In the modern data center, IT is charged with driving maximum performance for business-critical workloads, scaling without disruption as the business grows, and enabling the business to take on new data-driven initiatives. AFF A-Series systems handle all of it with ease.

AFF A-Series systems deliver industry-leading performance proven by SPC-1 and SPEC SFS industry benchmarks, making them ideal for demanding, highly transactional applications such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, MongoDB databases, VDI, and server virtualization.

With the power of front-end NVMe/FC and NVMe/TCP host connectivity and back-end NVMe-attached SSDs, our high-end AFF A900 systems deliver latency as low as 100µs. Based on a high-resiliency design, the A900 also delivers high RAS and enables non-disruptive in-chassis upgrade from its predecessor A700. The A800 delivers high performance in a compact form factor and is especially suited for EDA and Media & Entertainment workloads. The midrange, most versatile AFF A400 system features hardware acceleration technology that significantly enhances performance and storage efficiency. And our entry-level, budget-friendly AFF A250, provides 40% more performance and 33% more efficiency at no extra cost compared with its predecessor. AFF A-Series also lets you:

• Drive mission-critical SAN workloads with symmetric active-active host connectivity for continuous availability and instant failover.
• Consolidate workloads to deliver up to 14.4 million IOPS at 1ms latency in a cluster with a truly unified scale-out architecture. Built-in adaptive quality of service (QoS) safeguards SLAs in multi-workload and multitenant environments.
• Manage massively scalable NAS containers of up to 20PB and 400 billion files with a single namespace.
• Improve the speed and productivity of collaboration across multiple locations and increase data throughput for read-intensive applications with NetApp FlexCache^® software.

AFF A-Series all-flash systems deliver industry-leading performance, density, scalability, security, and network connectivity. As the first enterprise-grade storage systems to support both NVMe/TCP and NVMe/FC, AFF A-Series systems boost performance with modern network connectivity. With NVMe/TCP, which uses the commonly available Ethernet infrastructure, you don’t have to invest in new hardware to take advantage of the faster host connectivity. With NVMe/FC, you can get twice the IOPS and cut application response time in half compared with traditional FC. These systems support a range of ecosystems, including VMware, Microsoft Windows 10, and Linux, with storage path failover. For most customers, integrating NVMe/FC into an existing SAN is a simple, nondisruptive software upgrade.

With AFF A-Series, you can integrate new technologies and private or public cloud into your infrastructure nondisruptively. AFF A-Series is the only all-flash array that enables you to combine different controllers, SSD sizes, and new technologies so that your investment is protected. The NVMe-based AFF systems also support SAS SSDs, maximizing the flexibility and cost effectiveness of your upgrade.

IT departments are striving to make budgets go further and to allow IT staff to focus on new value-added projects rather than on day-to-day IT management. AFF systems simplify IT operations, which therefore reduces data center cost. In particular, our entry-level system, the AFF A250, delivers best-in-class performance and efficiency to mid-size business customers so they can consolidate more workloads and eliminate silos.

NetApp AFF systems offer broad application ecosystem support and deep integration for enterprise applications, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), database, and server virtualization, supporting Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, VMware, SAP, MySQL, and more. You can quickly provision storage in less than 10 minutes with NetApp ONTAP System Manager. In addition, infrastructure management tools simplify and automate common storage tasks so you can:

• Easily provision and rebalance workloads by monitoring clusters and nodes.
• Use one-click automation and self-service for provisioning and data protection.
• Upgrade OS and firmware with a single-click
• Import LUNs from third-party storage arrays directly into an AFF system to seamlessly migrate data.

In addition, the NetApp^® Active IQ^® Digital Advisor engine enables you to optimize your NetApp systems with predictive analytics and proactive support. Fueled by the massive NetApp user base, AI and machine learning create actionable insights that help you prevent problems, optimize your configuration, save time, and make smarter decisions.

NetApp employs various capabilities to promote optimal capacity savings and to drive down your TCO. AFF A-Series system’s support for solid-state drives (SSDs) with multistream write technology, combined with advanced SSD partitioning, provides maximum usable capacity, regardless of the type of data that you store. Thin provisioning; NetApp Snapshot™ copies; and inline data reduction features, such as deduplication, compression, and compaction, provide substantial additional space savings—without affecting performance—enabling you to purchase the least amount of storage capacity possible.

Your data fabric built by NetApp helps you simplify and integrate data management across cloud and on-premises environments to meet business demands and gain a competitive edge. With AFF A-Series, you can connect to more clouds for more data services, data tiering, caching, and disaster recovery. You can also:

• Maximize performance and reduce overall storage costs by automatically tiering cold data to the cloud with FabricPool.
• Instantly deliver data to support efficient collaboration across your hybrid cloud
• Protect your data by taking advantage of Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) cloud resources—on premises and in the public cloud.
• Accelerate read performance for data that is shared widely throughout your organization and across hybrid cloud deployments.

As organizations become more data driven, the business impact of data loss can be increasingly dramatic—and costly. IT must protect data from both internal and external threats, ensure data availability, eliminate maintenance disruptions, and quickly recover from failures.

AFF A-Series systems come with a full suite of acclaimed NetApp integrated and application-consistent data protection software. Key capabilities include:

• Native space efficiency with cloning and NetApp Snapshot copies reduce storage costs and minimize performance impact. Up to 1,023 copies are supported.
• NetApp^® SnapCenter^® software provides application-consistent data protection and clone management to simplify application management.
• NetApp^® SnapMirror^® technology replicates to any NetApp FAS or AFF system on the premises or in the cloud, reducing overall system costs.

With AFF, you can maintain constant data availability with zero data loss and zero downtime. NetApp MetroCluster™ software provides synchronous replication to protect your entire system, and NetApp SnapMirror Business Continuity provides a more flexible, cost-effective business continuity to even with more granular replication of selected critical data.

Flexible encryption and key management help guard your sensitive data on the premises, in the cloud, and in transit. The market-leading anti-ransomware protection for both preemption and post-attack recovery safeguards your critical data from ransomware attacks and can prevent catastrophic financial consequences. With the simple and efficient security solutions, you can:

• Achieve FIPS 140-2 compliance (Level 1 and Level 2) with self-encrypting drives and use any type of drives with software-based encryption.
• Meet governance, risk, and compliance requirements with security features such as secure purge; logging and auditing monitors; and write once, read many (WORM) file locking.
• Protect against threats with multifactor authentication, role-based access control, secure multitenancy, and storage-level file security.