NetApp delivers 'simplicity and savings' to Block Storage

NetApp has announced several innovative products and programs including a new modern block storage offering and a guarantee highlighting NetApp’s best-in-class ability to recover from ransomware attacks.

This announcement addresses critical customer challenges including increasing IT complexity, restricted IT budgets, increased urgency around sustainability, and the continued exponential growth of cyberthreats. NetApp’s new ASA (All-Flash SAN Array) A-Series family simplifies the deployment of modern SAN infrastructure, while providing guaranteed availability and guaranteed efficiency with accompanying cost savings and leading sustainability. NetApp is also announcing a Ransomware Recovery Guarantee at a time when ransomware costs to global organisations are expected to rise from $20 billion in 2021 to $265 billion by 2031.

“In an increasingly complex world, organisations are looking for simplicity and security as a baseline,” said Sandeep Singh, Senior Vice President and GM Enterprise Storage. “NetApp’s leadership in storage technology helps customers solve data storage challenges with operational simplicity at scale, built-in security to manage and recover from ransomware threats, and Flash storage backed by guaranteed efficiencies to meet or exceed sustainability and savings goals.”

Building upon NetApp's history of excellence and innovation in storage, today's enhancements to NetApp’s portfolio include:

NetApp ASA – Increased Simplicity for Modern Block Storage

Leveraging more than two decades of data storage expertise and more than 20,000 SAN workload customers, NetApp is extending its leadership in NAS and Unified storage with a dedicated block storage line of products, enabling customers to collapse infrastructure silos and simplify their structured and unstructured data environments on-prem and in the cloud.

The NetApp ASA A-Series is a new line of SAN-specific flash storage systems that delivers superior performance, scalability, data availability, efficiency, and hybrid cloud connectivity for business-critical applications and databases. Additional features include:

●        6 Nines data availability guarantee (99.9999%)*

●        NetApp ASA delivers industry-leading effective capacity with industry-leading usable capacity combined with NetApp’s 4:1 Storage Efficiency Guarantee*

●        Building on NetApp’s commitment to sustainability, NetApp ASA delivers up to 50% lower power consumption and associated carbon emissions than competitive offerings

●        Modern data storage built on all-NVMe performance flash with NVMe/FC, NVMe/TCP, FC, and iSCSI protocols

●        Continuous data access to all ASA arrays with symmetric active-active architecture typically found only on the most cost-prohibitive high-end arrays

●        Storage Lifecycle Program, which offers customers non-disruptive upgrades to the latest storage controller technology every three, four, or five years at no additional cost

●        Integrated data protection and hybrid cloud connectivity to ensure data is secure and can extend to AWS, Azure and GCP

“NetApp’s latest ASA enhancements provide more flexibility to our existing mission-critical databases and adds data efficiency at a lower price," said Reinoud Reynders, IT Manager Infrastructure & Operations at UZ Leuven. "The new data availability and efficiency guarantees gives us added confidence that NetApp is also the right partner for UZ Leuven as we scale.”

NetApp Ransomware Recovery Guarantee

The NetApp Ransomware Recovery Guarantee leverages the NetApp ONTAP unique and industry-only combination of key built-in security and ransomware protection features. ONTAP can automatically block known malicious file types, block rogue admins and malicious users with multi-admin verification, and provide tamper-proof snapshots that can’t be deleted – even by the storage administrator. With ONTAP’s industry-leading autonomous ransomware protection, attacks can be detected, additional snapshots are taken immediately, and recovery can occur in a matter of minutes. Given this unparalleled combination of technologies, NetApp will now warrant snapshot data recovery in the event of a ransomware attack. In the event that data copies can’t be recovered with help from NetApp or partner assistance, NetApp will offer compensation*.

In addition to the new NetApp ASA family and the NetApp Ransomware Recovery Guarantee, this launch is accompanied by:

●        ONTAP One, the most comprehensive all-inclusive and built-in storage software, is now available for all AFF, ASA, and FAS systems. NetApp is also making the capabilities built into ONTAP One available to existing deployed systems under support.

●        ONTAP May 2023 Release, which improves ransomware protection and management of consolidated workloads.

●        StorageGRID 11.7 & StorageGRID SGF6112, a new version of the StorageGRID software with advanced capabilities for disaster recovery, updates for security and compliance, simplified user experience and more, plus a next-generation all-Flash object storage appliance with improved performance and density to support rapidly growing performance-hungry object workloads with large amounts of data, including AI, analytics, and data lakes.

●        NetApp Advance has expanded, growing NetApp’s portfolio of simplified buyer programs and guarantees, which continually evolve customer’s storage environments with confidence.

"This announcement is strategic for NetApp, but also aligns to what ESG is finding within our research, which is that the data centre isn’t going away,” said Scott Sinclair, Practice Director at Enterprise Strategy Group. “Data demands are growing every day, players like NetApp recognise this and see the need for innovation everywhere. It’s great to see more storage options from NetApp, the leaders in File, who pioneered the Unified movement."