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Unified Data Storage

NetApp AFF A-Series

NetApp AFF A-Series systems easily power your most demanding workloads—from the mission-critical apps that run your business today to the AI and GenAI workloads that will unlock innovation and productivity in the future.

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NetApp AFF A-Series

NetApp® AFF A-Series systems easily power your most demanding workloads—from the mission-critical apps that run your business today to the AI and GenAI workloads that will unlock innovation and productivity in the future.

With the advanced data management, industry-leading ransomware protection, and cloud integration that GenAI and other modern workloads demand, only NetApp delivers true unified storage architected for the next generation. The AFF A-Series storage family, powered by NetApp ONTAP® data management software, delivers the same NetApp simplicity and reliability that tens of thousands of organizations of every size, in every industry, around the globe, have trusted for years.

It's the same technology that the top three public clouds rely on to drive all your apps and data across hybrid cloud. No more silos, no more storage complexity. Just powerful, intelligent, secure storage to seamlessly accelerate your business.

Key Capabilities

At a glance

  • Powerful
  • Intelligent
  • Secure
  • Intelligent data infrastructure for hybrid cloud
  • Unified data storage with ONTAP
NetApp AFF A-Series overview

Features and Benefits

The capabilities that set NetApp AFF A-Series apart.

Key Benefits

Powerful

  • Turbocharge every workload—VMware, database, AI—with 40 million IOPS, 1TBps throughput, and massive scale.
  • Enable unmatched power and consolidation for all your workloads with hyperefficient, unified storage that supports block, file, and object.
  • Accelerate without trade-offs through consistent performance, AQoS, and proven 99.9999% data availability.

Intelligent

  • Transform with an AI-ready ecosystem built on data-driven intelligence, future-proof infrastructure, and deep integrations with NVIDIA and the MLOps ecosystem.
  • Seamlessly manage, protect, and mobilize data, at the lowest cost, across hybrid cloud with a single storage OS and the industry's richest data services suite.
  • Simplify and automate hybrid operations with AIOps, efficient AI model versioning, and intuitive hybrid multicloud control delivered by BlueXP.

Secure

  • Protect valuable data from cyberthreats with built-in AI/ML-based real-time ransomware detection designed for industry-first 99%+ accuracy, SIEM/XDR integrations, and guaranteed recovery with end-to-end orchestration.
  • Trust in the only hardened enterprise storage that's validated to store top-secret data.
  • Prevent app disruptions, even during site failures, with integrated business continuity.

Transform to meet the needs of business today

Intelligent data infrastructure for hybrid cloud

Data-driven organizations require an agile and efficient hybrid IT infrastructure to meet the demand for fast, secure, and continuous access to distributed data in the hybrid cloud. NetApp's intelligent data infrastructure delivers the industry's richest suite of data services across hybrid multicloud, enabling teams to seamlessly consume the services they require, on premises or in the cloud.

Unified data storage with ONTAP

NetApp technologies, including the AFF A-Series, are anchored in unified data storage, which enables businesses to run any data type, and any app workload, across their premises and cloud with a single OS: ONTAP. A unified management experience provides ease of use and efficiency, eliminating infrastructure silos and data bottlenecks and delivering unmatched simplicity at scale.

Industry-leading performance for emerging workloads

Emerging workloads, such as AI and GenAI, data analytics, and deep learning, demand extreme performance. AFF A-Series systems deliver industry-leading speed, massive scalability, and best-in-class integration with public clouds, NVIDIA, and the MLOps ecosystem to help you accelerate, manage, and protect your next-generation apps across hybrid cloud.

Why organizations rely on AFF systems

  • Accelerate and consolidate every workload (VMware, database, AI, and more) with unmatched performance, efficiency, and scale
  • Drive transformation with a future-proof intelligent data infrastructure that seamlessly manages, protects, and mobilizes data across hybrid cloud
  • Protect business-critical data against internal and external threats with real-time ransomware detection, guaranteed recovery, and business continuity

Turbocharge every workload without trade-offs

Turbocharge every workload without trade-offs

Industry-leading performance

NetApp AFF A-Series systems deliver industry-leading performance, verified by SPC-1 and SPEC SFS industry benchmarks. These systems are ideal for everything from VMware environments, to highly transactional applications (such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and MongoDB databases), to the most data-intensive AI training, tuning, inferencing, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) workloads.

AFF A1K

With the power of front-end NVMe/FC and NVMe/TCP host connectivity combined with back-end NVMe-attached SSDs, the high-end AFF A1K modular system delivers up to 40 million IOPS and 1TBps throughput in a single cluster through a unified, scale-out architecture.

AFF A90

The AFF A90 system also delivers high-end performance—in an integrated form factor that's especially well suited for AI (including GenAI), EDA, and media/entertainment workloads. It also enables in-chassis nondisruptive upgrades.

AFF A70

The integrated midrange AFF A70 system puts outstanding performance and flexibility (more I/O on network connection) within your budget.

AFF A50, A30, and A20

The midrange AFF A50, AFF A30, and the entry-level AFF A20 all-flash storage systems offer high performance at an aggressive price point.

Performance with efficiency

With the new AFF A-Series systems, you'll never need to choose between performance and efficiency. You'll have always-on improved data compression and no performance impact, thanks to QuickAssist Technology (Intel QAT). The systems allow you to achieve exceptional storage efficiency while delivering the consistent high performance needed for mission-critical workloads. In addition, the new systems come with faster front-end 200Gb Ethernet and 64Gb FC networking connectivity.

Reliability, availability, and serviceability

All AFF A-Series systems offer advanced reliability, availability, and serviceability to keep your critical data available. They also provide comprehensive data management and data protection capabilities for your enterprise applications with industry-leading ONTAP software.

Leverage unmatched consolidation and scale

Consolidate all your workloads

  • Deliver up to 2x better performance compared to previous generations of systems, with latency as low as 100μs
  • Support any data type, any app workload, across hybrid cloud
  • Provide consistent performance, adaptive quality of service (AQoS), and proven 99.9999% data availability to safeguard SLAs even in multiworkload and multitenant environments
  • Scale nondisruptively to 185PB in a single namespace
  • Improve the speed and productivity of collaborative teams across multiple locations and increase data throughput for read-intensive applications with NetApp FlexCache® software

Enable your AI workloads

Five critical AI capabilities

AI holds the promise of new levels of innovation and productivity—and AFF A-Series systems are the ideal storage solution to power your AI initiatives and other data-intensive workloads. The AFF A-Series gives enterprises five critical AI capabilities:
  • Unify data across hybrid cloud and efficiently and securely serve data science teams.
  • Deliver abundant levels of performance, efficiency, and scalability to power every segment of the AI data pipeline, up to and including AI-as-a-service model training tasks in enterprises.
  • Streamline AI workflows with model interpretability, simple versioning, and clear visibility into data lineage.
  • Get seamless, proven data management across hybrid multicloud to enable hybrid cloud workloads.
  • Improve GenAI accuracy and insights by training large foundational models with your secured data sets.

Add AI without silos

With AFF A-Series systems, you can add AI workloads to your existing ecosystem as needed without creating new silos or complexity.

Keep important data available, protected, and secure

Protection from data loss

For data-driven enterprises, the business impact of data loss can be dramatic—and costly. Organizations must protect their valuable data from ransomware and other external cyberattacks, and from internal threats, to keep their data available, eliminate disruptions, and quickly recover from failures.

Hardened enterprise storage with integrated data protections

AFF systems are the only hardened enterprise storage validated to store top-secret data. They deliver a comprehensive suite of integrated and application-consistent data protections, including:
  • Robust protection through multifactor authentication, immutable tamperproof NetApp Snapshot™ copies, end-to-end encryption, and automatic blocking of malicious file types
  • Real-time autonomous ransomware detection, enhanced by embedded (ML) models, designed for industry-first 99%+ accuracy
  • SIEM/XDR integrations
  • Guaranteed recovery with end-to-end orchestration through the NetApp Ransomware Recovery Guarantee and Ransomware Recovery Assurance Service
  • Integrated active-active business continuity
  • Cyber-vault capability that combines advanced encryption, immutable backups, and air-gapped storage
  • Application-consistent data protection and clone management with the NetApp SnapCenter® licensed capability
  • Replication to any NetApp AFF or FAS system on the premises or in the cloud with NetApp SnapMirror® technology
NetApp is the only storage vendor that can give you this level of comprehensive, automated protection and guaranteed recovery.

Ransomware Recovery Guarantee

NetApp warrants Snapshot data recovery if a ransomware attack occurs. If you can't recover your data copies with help from NetApp or partner assistance, NetApp offers compensation.

Integrate business continuity and get fast disaster recovery

With AFF, you can maintain constant data availability with zero data loss and zero downtime if disruption or disaster occurs. NetApp MetroCluster® software replicates your data synchronously to a separate location to protect your entire system. If something goes wrong at one site, your applications automatically and instantaneously switch to the other site. For a more tailored approach, choose NetApp SnapMirror active sync to cost-efficiently replicate the most critical data while taking advantage of the increased performance, greater flexibility, and enhanced load-balancing capability that come with the symmetric active-active architecture.

Compliance and security

With NetApp's comprehensive security solutions, you can achieve FIPS 140-2 compliance (Level 1 and Level 2) with self-encrypting drives. And you can 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.

Increase operational efficiency for your business

Lower IT costs with ONTAP

With NetApp ONTAP advanced data management, you can lower IT costs by simplifying operations, consolidating workloads, and lowering overhead.

Application ecosystem support and automation

NetApp AFF A-Series systems offer broad support of application ecosystems and deep integration for enterprise applications, virtual desktop infrastructure, databases, server virtualization, and MLOps. Infrastructure management tools simplify and automate common storage tasks:
  • Easily provision and rebalance workloads in minutes with one-click automation and self-service.
  • Upgrade your 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 BlueXP™ digital advisor enables you to optimize your NetApp systems with predictive analytics and proactive support.

Flexibly consume storage resources

Built for the AI era

NetApp AFF A-Series systems are unified data storage built for the AI era. This intelligent data infrastructure enables you to architect for the future while powering all of your workloads today.

Capex or as-a-service with NetApp Keystone

Like the rest of the NetApp portfolio, the new AFF A-Series systems are available through traditional capex or as a service with the NetApp Keystone® portfolio. Gain financial flexibility as you modernize, and better align IT expenditure to business needs.

Get more business value with services

Whether you're planning your next-generation data center, need specialized know-how for a major storage deployment, or want to optimize the operational efficiency of your existing infrastructure, NetApp Professional Services and NetApp Certified Partners can help.

Storage Lifecycle Program

Eliminate the headache of tech refreshes with the Storage Lifecycle Program: Get a new controller every 3 years with support-managed updates included, or move to the cloud—whichever best meets your needs.

AFF A-Series Software

Data access protocols

  • FC, iSCSI, NVMe/FC, NVMe/TCP, NFS, NFSv4/RDMA, SMB, S3

High availability

  • Active-active controller architecture
  • Nondisruptive maintenance, upgrade, and scale-out clustering
  • Multisite resiliency for continuous data access

Storage efficiency

  • Inline data compression, deduplication, and compaction
  • Space-efficient LUN, file, and volume cloning
  • Automatic data tiering

Data management

  • Intuitive onboard GUI, REST APIs, and automation integration
  • AI-informed predictive analytics and corrective action
  • QoS workload control
  • Easy provisioning and data management from market-leading host operating systems, hypervisors, and application software
  • Multisite copy caching for improved read and write performance over distance

Scalable NAS

  • Large-scale single namespace management with local and remote caching

Data protection

  • Application-consistent snapshot copies and restore capabilities
  • Integrated remote backup and disaster recovery
  • Synchronous zero-data-loss replication
  • Symmetric active-active multi-site replication for business continuity

Security and compliance

  • Automatic ransomware protection
  • Multifactor administrative access, multi-admin verification, dynamic authorization framework
  • Secure multitenant shared storage
  • Tamper-proof snapshots with SnapLock
  • In-flight and data-at-rest encryption
  • Regulatory-compliant data retention

Cloud integration

  • Seamlessly tier, back up, replicate, and cache data to private and public clouds
Expert Guidance

Thrive with expert-led storage guidance

Get tailored advice on how NetApp AFF A-Series fits your environment — from sizing and deployment to long-term optimization.

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Technical Specifications

Exhaustive hardware and software metrics extracted directly from official documentation.

  • Maximum scale-out
    2–24 nodes (12 HA pairs)
  • Maximum SSDs
    2880
  • Maximum effective capacity
    330PB
  • Controller chassis form factor
    2X2U
  • Power consumption (median)
    2718W (with NS224)
  • PCIe expansion slots
    18
  • FC target ports (64Gb autoranging)
    48
  • FC target ports (32Gb autoranging)
    48
  • FC target ports (16Gb autoranging)
    48
  • FCoE target ports, UTA2
    n/a
  • 200GbE ports (100GbE/40GbE autoranging)
    24
  • 100GbE ports (40GbE autoranging)
    36
  • 25GbE ports (10GbE autoranging)
    48
  • 10GbE ports
    48
  • 10GBASE-T (1GbE autoranging)
    48
  • 12Gb/6Gb SAS ports
    n/a
  • OS version
    ONTAP 9.15.1 or later
  • Shelves and media
    NS224 (2U, 24 drives, SFF NVMe)
  • Host/client OS supported
    Windows Server, Linux, Oracle Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, macOS, VMware, ESX

  • Maximum scale-out
    2–24 nodes (12 HA pairs)
  • Maximum SSDs
    2880
  • Maximum effective capacity
    330PB
  • Controller chassis form factor
    4U; 48 internal SSD slots
  • Power consumption (median)
    1950W
  • PCIe expansion slots
    18
  • FC target ports (64Gb autoranging)
    56
  • FC target ports (32Gb autoranging)
    56
  • FC target ports (16Gb autoranging)
    56
  • FCoE target ports, UTA2
    n/a
  • 200GbE ports (100GbE/40GbE autoranging)
    24
  • 100GbE ports (40GbE autoranging)
    36
  • 25GbE ports (10GbE autoranging)
    56
  • 10GbE ports
    56
  • 10GBASE-T (1GbE autoranging)
    56
  • 12Gb/6Gb SAS ports
    n/a
  • OS version
    ONTAP 9.15.1 or later
  • Shelves and media
    NS224 (2U, 24 drives, SFF NVMe)
  • Host/client OS supported
    Windows Server, Linux, Oracle Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, macOS, VMware, ESX

  • Maximum scale-out
    2–24 nodes (12 HA pairs)
  • Maximum SSDs
    2880
  • Maximum effective capacity
    330PB
  • Controller chassis form factor
    4U; 48 internal SSD slots
  • Power consumption (median)
    1232W
  • PCIe expansion slots
    18
  • FC target ports (64Gb autoranging)
    56
  • FC target ports (32Gb autoranging)
    56
  • FC target ports (16Gb autoranging)
    56
  • FCoE target ports, UTA2
    n/a
  • 200GbE ports (100GbE/40GbE autoranging)
    24
  • 100GbE ports (40GbE autoranging)
    36
  • 25GbE ports (10GbE autoranging)
    56
  • 10GbE ports
    56
  • 10GBASE-T (1GbE autoranging)
    56
  • 12Gb/6Gb SAS ports
    n/a
  • OS version
    ONTAP 9.15.1 or later
  • Shelves and media
    NS224 (2U, 24 drives, SFF NVMe)
  • Host/client OS supported
    Windows Server, Linux, Oracle Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, macOS, VMware, ESX

  • Maximum scale-out
    2–24 nodes (12 HA pairs)
  • Maximum SSDs
    1440
  • Maximum effective capacity
    186PB
  • Controller chassis form factor
    2U; 24 internal SSD slots
  • Power consumption (median)
    512W
  • PCIe expansion slots
    8
  • FC target ports (64Gb autoranging)
    24
  • FC target ports (32Gb autoranging)
    24
  • FC target ports (16Gb autoranging)
    24
  • FCoE target ports, UTA2
    64
  • 200GbE ports (100GbE/40GbE autoranging)
    n/a
  • 100GbE ports (40GbE autoranging)
    16
  • 25GbE ports (10GbE autoranging)
    24
  • 10GbE ports
    24
  • 10GBASE-T (1GbE autoranging)
    24
  • 12Gb/6Gb SAS ports
    16
  • OS version
    ONTAP 9.16.1 or later
  • Shelves and media
    NS224 (2U, 24 drives, SFF NVMe)
  • Host/client OS supported
    Windows Server, Linux, Oracle Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, macOS, VMware, ESX

  • Maximum scale-out
    2-8 nodes (4 HA pairs)
  • Maximum SSDs
    288
  • Maximum effective capacity
    36.2PB
  • Controller chassis form factor
    2U; 24 internal SSD slots
  • Power consumption (median)
    495W
  • PCIe expansion slots
    8
  • FC target ports (64Gb autoranging)
    24
  • FC target ports (32Gb autoranging)
    24
  • FC target ports (16Gb autoranging)
    24
  • FCoE target ports, UTA2
    n/a
  • 200GbE ports (100GbE/40GbE autoranging)
    n/a
  • 100GbE ports (40GbE autoranging)
    16
  • 25GbE ports (10GbE autoranging)
    24
  • 10GbE ports
    24
  • 10GBASE-T (1GbE autoranging)
    24
  • 12Gb/6Gb SAS ports
    16
  • OS version
    ONTAP 9.16.1 or later
  • Shelves and media
    NS224 (2U, 24 drives, SFF NVMe)
  • Host/client OS supported
    Windows Server, Linux, Oracle Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, macOS, VMware, ESX

  • Maximum scale-out
    2–6 nodes (3 HA pairs)
  • Maximum SSDs
    144
  • Maximum effective capacity
    18.8PB
  • Controller chassis form factor
    2U; 24 internal SSD slots
  • Power consumption (median)
    432W
  • PCIe expansion slots
    8
  • FC target ports (64Gb autoranging)
    24
  • FC target ports (32Gb autoranging)
    24
  • FC target ports (16Gb autoranging)
    24
  • FCoE target ports, UTA2
    n/a
  • 200GbE ports (100GbE/40GbE autoranging)
    n/a
  • 100GbE ports (40GbE autoranging)
    12
  • 25GbE ports (10GbE autoranging)
    32
  • 10GbE ports
    24
  • 10GBASE-T (1GbE autoranging)
    24
  • 12Gb/6Gb SAS ports
    16
  • OS version
    ONTAP 9.16.1 or later
  • Shelves and media
    NS224 (2U, 24 drives, SFF NVMe)
  • Host/client OS supported
    Windows Server, Linux, Oracle Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, macOS, VMware, ESX

Compare NetApp AFF A-Series Series

Select the right scale for your workload demands.

Model Name Max Capacity Port Config Action
AFF A1K 330PB 48 FC (64Gb), 24 200GbE, 36 100GbE, 48 25GbE, 48 10GbE, 48 10GBASE-T Get Quote
AFF A90 330PB 56 FC (64Gb), 24 200GbE, 36 100GbE, 56 25GbE, 56 10GbE, 56 10GBASE-T Get Quote
AFF A70 330PB 56 FC (64Gb), 24 200GbE, 36 100GbE, 56 25GbE, 56 10GbE, 56 10GBASE-T Get Quote
AFF A50 186PB 24 FC (64Gb), 64 FCoE UTA2, 16 100GbE, 24 25GbE, 24 10GbE, 24 10GBASE-T, 16 12Gb/6Gb SAS Get Quote
AFF A30 36.2PB 24 FC (64Gb), 16 100GbE, 24 25GbE, 24 10GbE, 24 10GBASE-T, 16 12Gb/6Gb SAS Get Quote
AFF A20 18.8PB 24 FC (64Gb), 12 100GbE, 32 25GbE, 24 10GbE, 24 10GBASE-T, 16 12Gb/6Gb SAS Get Quote

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