NetApp ups the innovation ante

In the past year, NetApp has doubled down on our commitment to provide customers with the right storage to meet their business needs. We introduced two block-optimized all-flash families: the NetApp® ASA A-Series, designed for the most performance-demanding and mission-critical applications, and the ASA C-Series, optimized for cost-effective deployment of business-critical applications. 

The reaction has been electric. Powered by ASA’s price advantage--costing up to 50% less than the competition—customers have adopted ASA into their NetApp ONTAP^® unified data storage environments at a record pace. 

Over that same time period, I’ve been traveling worldwide to meet with customers of every size across industries. I wanted to know how the entire NetApp portfolio has met your requirements, and what more we could do to help. 

Here’s what you told me: For too long, you’ve had to choose between simple and powerful. Making trade-offs between operational simplicity and high-end storage capabilities like scale-out clustering and advanced data management is untenable. This choice has hindered your efforts at modernizing your data centers. Meanwhile, IT complexity remains a primary challenge, and you need solutions that attack the problem head-on. 

With today’s announcement from NetApp, you no longer have to compromise in your storage choice. We’ve innovated once again to deliver the simplest, most capable storage yet. 

Introducing the new NetApp ASA A-Series systems—simple, powerful, scale-out all-flash block storage with advanced data management capabilities and an affordable price. The ASA A-Series is set to be a game changer for your modernization efforts. Here’s why: 

• ASA is incredibly simple. We’re talking deployment in minutes, provisioning in seconds, and protecting workloads in one click. With deep VMware integration, you can manage easily from vCenter. You don’t need a PhD in storage to manage it. 

• ASA is all-around powerful. With abundant performance, scale-out clustering, load balancing, guaranteed six-nines data availability, built-in intelligent data management and protection, and a ransomware recovery guarantee, you’ve got everything you need to accelerate VMware and database apps. 

• ASA is super affordable. We want to make your purchase decision easy, so ASA comes with a serious price advantage of up to 50% over competitive systems, and far better return on investment. That means you can meet your CFO’s budget mandates while modernizing and streamlining your IT. 

It’s worth pausing for a moment on ASA’s price advantage, because it’s not just the upfront cost. With these new systems, we help drive down your TCO in several ways: 

• ASA’s leading raw-to-effective capacity, always-on storage efficiency, and 4:1 Storage Efficiency Guarantee mean you’ll need less storage. 

• If your IT team is already using ONTAP for file workloads, adopting ASA means operational efficiency gains: common management and automation workflows across your NAS and SAN environment. 

• And by offloading data management to ONTAP, we can help optimize and lower your VMware costs by up to 25%. 

Simple, powerful, and affordable, NetApp ASA A-Series technology enables modernization, consolidation, and simplicity at scale for every organization.  

Dive into the new ASA A-Series 

On the topic of affordability and TCO, we’re also introducing new NetApp FAS hybrid flash systems today. Why is this important? Some vendors have been making a lot of noise trying to convince customers that hybrid flash is dead, but that’s simple misdirection.  

When you’re looking for the lowest cost of data over its lifecycle, cost-optimized hybrid flash is the best option. Hybrid flash makes an ideal target for secondary storage use cases like data tiering, backup, and cyber vaulting. Consider: 

• When 60% or more of enterprise primary storage data typically consists of cold data, automatic ONTAP policy-based data tiering to hybrid flash delivers lowest cost of storage in the lifecycle cost of data. And the data you move to FAS retains its primary storage efficiencies. 

• With FAS as a backup target, you can even consolidate your 3-2-1 backup strategy entirely on a single cloud-connected storage OS. 

• Like the rest of the NetApp portfolio, FAS is the safest storage on the planet for critical backups and as a resilient, logically air-gapped cyber vault target. 

Built on our newest generation of hardware and ONTAP 9.15.1, the new FAS70 and FAS90 are economical, simple, and secure. You get low-cost hybrid storage with seamless scale of capacity and performance, fast recovery, and deep integration to public cloud. 

Explore the benefits of FAS. 

You can take advantage of the new systems joining our storage lineup today in the way that best suits your business needs—through traditional capex, or as a service through the NetApp Keystone^® portfolio. As the only true hybrid cloud storage as a service (STaaS) offering in the market, Keystone delivers STaaS on a common storage OS—ONTAP—that powers block, file, and object workloads on premises, in colocation facilities, and in all three major public clouds. Through a single subscription, Keystone delivers all the power of NetApp intelligent data infrastructure—without the upfront investment. 

With Keystone, you can leverage consumption-based, industry-leading performance and resilience alongside seamless hybrid data mobility to accelerate and optimize your IT. And today we’re expanding the value of Keystone by enabling our STaaS customers to benefit from NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights (formerly Cloud Insights) full-stack infrastructure monitoring by integrating it into your Keystone subscription. 

Check out Keystone.

Simple, powerful, affordable block-optimized ASA A-Series primary storage drives modernization. Economical, simple, secure FAS powers your secondary storage workloads. Everything is available as a service, and all part of an ONTAP powered unified data storage ecosystem that continues to deliver greater efficiencies: Your team only needs to train on ONTAP once, for all your storage workloads. You can consolidate to a single data security model that you can trust. And you can enjoy comprehensive data protection with one common recovery workflow.  

NetApp unified data storage makes it possible. No other vendor in the market even comes close to matching our intelligent data infrastructure. Talk with your NetApp sales representative or one of our valued partners about how ASA, FAS, and the rest of our storage portfolio can transform your storage environment.