Brand new is the AFF C-Series, a new all-flash QLC-based family, while the AFF A150 is a refresh of the entry level A-series model.

Today NetApp is making a series of announcements. The product-focused ones revolve around new all-flash devices. The new AFF C-Series is a new all-flash QLC-based family. The company is also announcing the AFF A150, a refresh of the older C190 model, as the entry level offering  in their AFF A-Series family of all-flash systems. NetApp is also announcing the expansion of their storage support programs beyond the 4:1 SAN Storage Efficiency Guarantee they were already offering into a rebranded NetApp Advance portfolio. NetApp Advance also includes a new NetApp Storage Lifecycle Program with no or low-cost controller upgrades, and a NetApp Cloud Advantage Program, which lets customers trade in controllers for full credit toward their choice of NetApp cloud solutions.

The new NetApp AFF C-Series is designed to help customers with issues arising out of the current economy.

“What we are seeing and hearing from customers is that they still have a need to modernize with all-flash or cloud.” said Sandeep Singh, SVP & GM Enterprise Storage, at NetApp. “That hasn’t changed. But there is more conservatism now in budget constrained environments, and sustainability has become an issues. Our new AFF C series lets them modernize with performance flash, capacity flash, or hybrid flash, depending where they are on their journey. It is a refresh of our high perfomance flash, aimed mainly at the midmarket, which combines the speed of flash and the economics of hybrid flash.”

Singh said this new series fits three basic use cases with its capability of delivering high-capacity flash performance at cost-effective price points. It contains three models: the AFF C250, AFF C400 and AFF C800.

“They fit well in Tier One workloads which typically require 2-4 ms latency,” he stated. “They also work well in secondary storage use cases like DR and recovery, and they are a good fit for storage systems with 10k hard drives transitioning to all-flash. The C Series comes with most comprehensive software suite, ONTAP ONE and is managed centrally by NetApp BlueXP.”

The new NetApp AFF A150 is an upgrade of the C190, which was introduced in June 2019. It is aimed at ROBO deployments, as well as deployments that require entry-level, enterprise-class storage.

The NetApp AFF C-Series family and NetApp AFF A150 are both available today.

The new NetApp Advance program builds what had been a more limited guarantee option into a fuller program, which is similar to other storage market programs, but there are some differences.

“Before we had an element in terms of efficiency guarantee that we put in place last year,” Singh said. “NetApp’s 4:1 SAN Storage Efficiency Guarantee offers that if workload efficiency goals are not met, we will fix this at no cost to the customer. We rolled that out in early last year, and it is available for all AFF all-flash systems. “Now we have added our NetApp Storage Lifecycle Program, and the NetApp Cloud Advantage Program, signalling a best in class ownership experience.”

The new NetApp Cloud Advantage Program lets organizations trade in controllers for full credit toward their choice of NetApp cloud solutions to enable easy scale out to the cloud in order to meet changing business demands.

“Cloud Advantage allows customers to exchange controllers to NetApp cloud storage solutions,” Singh said. “That’s something that is fundamentally unique to us.”

The new NetApp Storage Lifecycle Program offers, at no additional cost, non-disruptive upgrades to the latest storage controller technology every three, four, or five years, with an option to upgrade controllers at only incremental cost prior to three-year renewal.

“They can get a controller refresh every three years, or vary the upgrade time to say 4 years and two years, with the requirement being to get to the six year aggregate,” Singh stated.  It also includes remotely managed software updates including non-disruptive ONTAP software upgrades packed with new capabilities and enhancements, and premier-level support services like Active IQ and Cloud Insights that enable full-stack visibility and AIOps to streamline observability of the infrastructure beyond the storage layer in a single interface.

“This lets NetApp stands alone in hybrid cloud flexibility solutions,” Singh said.

NetApp also recently announced the GA of the Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud engine, giving the same status to Google as to its two large hyperscale competitors.

“It gives flexibility where they can run them on all three of the large cloud providers,” Singh said.