At its recent Insight customer event, NetApp announced its new SAN-optimized ASA A-Series all-flash storage solutions. It also unveiled updates to its popular FAS hybrid-flash systems, the new FAS70 and FAS90 solutions.

Let’s look at each.

New: ASA A-Series

The NetApp ASA A-Series is NetApp’s new SAN-optimized all-flash block storage solution. It consists of three models—ASA A1K, ASA A90, and ASA A70—each offering performance and resilience for applications like VMware and databases.

Figure 1: New ASA A-Series (source: NetApp)

These systems integrate with the NetApp ONTAP software, allowing unified storage management across hybrid cloud environments.

Key Features

The ASA A-Series offers a range of features catering to performance and operational simplicity. These features make it well-suited for organizations that require a balanced approach to storage:

• Unified ONTAP Integration:
  • All ASA models are powered by NetApp’s ONTAP operating system, ensuring compatibility across hybrid cloud environments.
  • ONTAP enables unified management of SAN and NAS environments, integrating file and block storage seamlessly.
  • Built-in data protection features, including backup and recovery, enhance security across workloads.
• Performance and Hardware:
  • Intel Quick Assist Technology (QAT) offloads data reduction tasks, improving performance and efficiency.
  • PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 memory provide high-speed data transfer and processing.
  • Supports IPsec and TLS 1.3 encryption offload for secure data transfers without compromising performance.
  • NetApp promises six-nines availability and built-in intelligent data management for resilient operations.

The ASA A-Series includes several key data management and security features to reduce operational overhead and ensure data integrity:

• Scale-Out Clustering:
  • Allows the system to scale storage resources dynamically as needed.
  • Ensures balanced workload distribution for optimal performance.
• Ransomware Recovery:
  • Provides built-in capabilities to recover data quickly in the event of ransomware attacks.
• Data Protection:
  • Includes automated backup and disaster recovery features.
  • Offers end-to-end encryption and multi-level security features, ensuring data always remains protected.

ASA Models and Variants

The ASA A-Series includes three models tailored to meet varying enterprise needs:

• ASA A1K: Entry-level model suited for small to medium workloads.
• ASA A90: Mid-tier model designed for more demanding applications.
• ASA A70: High-end model optimized for mission-critical applications and large-scale deployments.

New: FAS70 & FAS90 Solutions

NetApp’s FAS products are hybrid flash solutions that provide cost-effective, scalable storage solutions for secondary workloads, such as data tiering, backup, disaster recovery, and cyber vaulting.

Figure 2: New FAS Models (source: NetApp)

The newly introduced FAS70 and FAS90 models are built on NetApp’s latest hardware platform and integrated with ONTAP 9.15.1. They provide improved performance, scalability, and energy efficiency and are designed to support enterprises that need to store large amounts of secondary data without sacrificing security or ease of access.

• FAS70: Suited for medium-sized enterprises or departments needing hybrid flash storage for backup and tiering workloads.
• FAS90: A higher-end model designed for larger enterprises requiring more capacity and performance, capable of handling a wider range of workloads and supporting deeper cloud integration.

NetApp FAS systems are built on a hybrid architecture that combines SSDs for performance with HDDs for cost-effective large capacity. This allows the system to provide high-speed access to frequently used or “hot” data while storing less frequently accessed or “cold” data on more affordable HDDs:

• SSD Tier: Handles workloads requiring higher performance, such as active file shares or tiered databases.
• HDD Tier: Optimized for storing massive datasets that are not performance-sensitive, such as archived files, backups, and cold data.

NetApp’s ONTAP software enables intelligent, policy-driven tiering that seamlessly moves inactive or cold data from more expensive flash storage to lower-cost, slower HDD storage:

• 4:1 Storage Efficiency Guarantee: NetApp’s storage efficiency guarantee ensures businesses can optimize their storage footprint.

• ONTAP Policy-Based Tiering: Automatically tiers data based on access frequency, reducing the need for manual intervention and enabling more efficient use of storage resources.
• Cost Savings: This tiering approach helps reduce storage costs by ensuring that expensive flash storage is only used for data that requires fast access, while cold data is stored on cheaper, high-capacity HDDs.

With a hybrid architecture, cloud readiness, and comprehensive data protection features, the new FAS models offer a compelling solution for optimizing storage infrastructure while maintaining flexibility and security.

Analysis

NetApp’s new ASA A-Series bridges the gap between storage performance and operational simplicity without requiring costly investments in high-end hardware, making it a competitive and compelling solution.

Beyond the new platform, NetApp lays down the gauntlet with an aggressive pricing strategy for the new ASA offering that directly challenges its competitors. According to NetApp, the ASA A-Series is priced 25%-50% lower than other high-end storage solutions. This affordability, combined with the 4:1 storage efficiency guarantee and optimized VMware licensing costs, shows NetApp striving to dominate the cost-sensitive side of the market while maintaining enterprise-grade features. This is a win for cost-sensitive enterprise customers.

Similarly, NetApp’s new FAS70 and FAS90 models show a solid advancement in hybrid flash storage, offering a well-balanced solution for secondary storage workloads. By combining performance, scalability, and cost-efficiency with strong cloud integration and comprehensive data protection, these models meet the needs of modern enterprises looking to optimize their storage environments without making significant trade-offs.

NetApp has long had one of the broadest enterprise storage portfolios, differentiated by a consistent user experience (based on its common ONTAP operating system) across products. This continues with its new ASA A-Series and the new FAS models.

The ASA A-Series brings a new level of simplicity, performance, and affordability to all-flash block storage. At the same time, the FAS70 and FAS90 models offer a scalable, cost-effective solution for secondary workloads such as data tiering and backup. Together, these new offerings allow organizations to manage critical data across hybrid cloud environments without sacrificing security or efficiency.

By delivering storage solutions that cater to both high-performance primary workloads and cost-sensitive secondary applications, NetApp continues to serve the broad needs of the enterprise.