Overview:
An entry-level all-flash system in the AFF A-series family, the AFF A250 simplifies your data management at an accessible starting price while delivering amazing horse power for all your workloads. Designed to meet the data management needs for mid-size businesses or remote offices of a large enterprise, the AFF A250 modernizes your data center and accelerates enterprise applications, AI/ML, virtualization, as well as consolidation of different workloads. Plus, it allows you to connect to the cloud without a hitch, whenever you need to.
Smart, powerful and efficient—wrapped in one sleek package
You will be surprised how simple it is to set up the AFF A250. It uses the same set of software tools to manage your data, either on-prem or in the cloud. Better yet, it reduces your storage cost by automatically tiering cold data to the cloud. A powerhouse of its class, the AFF A250 is built on an end-to-end NVMe architecture that delivers a stunning 45% more performance than its predecessor. So you can consolidate a lot of workloads on a single system, simplifying support while eliminating silos.
NetApp AFF A-Series
Data-driven organizations require an agile and efficient IT infrastructure to meet the demand for fast, secure, and continuous data access. A fundamental first step in undertaking an IT transformation is to modernize your infrastructure with 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, more and more organizations are adopting a “cloud first” strategy, which means they need enterprise-grade data services for a shared environment across on-premises data centers and the cloud. As a result, modern all-flash arrays must provide robust data services, integrated data protection, seamless scalability, and new levels of performance— plus deep application and cloud integration.
Accelerate applications
- Speed up your critical applications with lightningfast end-to-end NVMe enterprise all-flash array.
- Run artificial intelligence and machine learning applications with lowest latency.
- Support twice as many workloads and cut application response time in half with a modern NVMe-based SAN infrastructure.
Reduce data center costs
- Minimize your data center footprint by storing up to 2PB of data in a 4U compact system.
- Save SSD storage by 5 to 10 times with inline data reduction technologies.
- Reduce power and cooling, rack space, and support costs dramatically.
Simplify IT operations
- Unify data services across SAN and NAS environments, both on the premises and in the cloud.
- Set up and configure a complete system and serve data within 10 minutes.
- Safeguard your data with best-in-class integrated data protection and seamless cloud backup and recovery
Cloud-connected flash storage powered by ONTAP
IT departments need smart, powerful, trusted solutions that take advantage of modern cloud technologies. NetApp AFF A-Series systems are designed to help organizations transform their infrastructure more quickly and fuel data-driven strategies. Powered by NetApp ONTAP data management software, AFF systems deliver the industry-leading performance, superior flexibility, and best-in-class data services and cloud integration to help you accelerate, manage, and protect your business-critical data in the hybrid cloud.
A wide range of customers, from enterprise to midsize businesses, rely on AFF to:
- Simplify operations with seamless data management, on the premises and in the cloud.
- Speed up existing and emerging applications.
- Keep business-critical data available, protected, and secure.
Why NetApp AFF A-Series?
NetApp AFF A-Series all-flash arrays are smart, powerful, and trusted solutions that take advantage of modern cloud technologies to deliver the speed, efficiency, and security your data fabric needs.
It’s time for data modernization
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.
NetApp AFF A-Series all-flash storage arrays are the answer
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.
Accelerates applications and future-proofs your infrastructure
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.
Maximum performance for your most demanding applications
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.
Modernize with advanced connectivity
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.
Scale without disruption
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.
Features:
Increase operational efficiency for your business
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 reduce data center cost by simplifying IT operations. The entry-level AFF A250 systems deliver best-in-class performance and efficiency to midsize business customers at low cost, helping you consolidate workloads and eliminate silos.
Provision storage in minutes
NetApp AFF systems offer broad support of application ecosystems and deep integration for enterprise applications, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), databases, and server virtualization. They support Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, VMware, SAP, MySQL, and more. You can provision storage in less than 10 minutes with NetApp ONTAP System Manager (formerly OnCommand® System Manager).
Infrastructure management tools simplify and automate common storage tasks so that 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 tool enables you to optimize your NetApp systems with predictive analytics and proactive support. Fueled by NetApp’s massive user base, AI and machine learning create actionable insights that help you prevent problems, optimize your configuration, save time, and make smarter decisions.
Achieve industry-leading storage savings
NetApp employs various capabilities to promote optimal capacity savings and to reduce your TCO. AFF systems' support for 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
Benefits of modernizing with all-flash.
Build your hybrid cloud with ease
When your organization builds a data fabric powered by NetApp technology, you can simplify and integrate data management across cloud and on-premises environments to meet business demands and gain a competitive edge. With AFF, 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.
- Improve read performance for data that's shared widely throughout your organization and across hybrid cloud deployments.
Accelerate applications and future-proof your infrastructure
In the modern data center, IT is charged with improving performance for business-critical workloads, scaling without disruption as the business grows, and enabling the business to take on new data-driven initiatives.
Automatic tiering to the cloud.
Get the best performance for your most demanding applications
NetApp AFF 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 combined with back-end NVMe-attached SSDs, the high-end AFF A900 system delivers 50% higher performance compared with its predecessor and latency as low as 100µs. Based on a high-resiliency design, the AFF A900 system enables in-chassis nondisruptive upgrades from its predecessor and advanced reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) that keep your critical data always available. It also provides all the core data management and data protection capabilities for your enterprise applications with the ONTAP Enterprise Edition software. The AFF A800 system also delivers high-end performance, but in a compact form that's especially suited for EDA and media/entertainment workloads. The midrange AFF A400 system puts outstanding performance within your budget. Its hardware acceleration technology significantly enhances performance and storage efficiency. And the entry-level system AFF A250 provides 40% more performance and 33% more efficiency at no extra cost compared with its predecessor. You can also:
- Drive your mission-critical SAN workloads with symmetric active-active host connectivity that delivers continuous availability and instant failover.
- Consolidate workloads on AFF systems, which can deliver up to 14.4 million IOPS at 1ms latency in a cluster with a truly unified scale-out architecture. You also get built-in adaptive quality of service (QoS) that safeguards SLAs in multiworkload 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.
Modernize with advanced NVMe
Designed specifically for flash, AFF A-Series allflash 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 and NVMe/TCP into an existing SAN is a simple, nondisruptive software upgrade.
Scale without disruption
You can integrate new technologies and private or public cloud into your infrastructure nondisruptively. AFF 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 newer NVMebased AFF systems also support SAS SSDs, maximizing the flexibility and cost effectiveness of your upgrade.
Industry-leading NVMe performance.
Keep important data available, protected, and secure
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.
Integrated data protection
AFF systems come with a full suite of acclaimed NetApp integrated and application-consistent data protection software. Key capabilities include the following:
- Native space efficiency with cloning and Snapshot copies reduces storage costs and minimizes 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.
Business continuity and fast disaster recovery
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 with even more granular replication of selected critical data.
Security everywhere
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.
