NetApp Unveils New High-Performance EF-Series Models

Key Terms

ai technical

Artificial intelligence (AI) is technology that enables machines to mimic human thinking and learning, allowing them to analyze information, recognize patterns, and make decisions. For investors, AI matters because it can improve how businesses operate, create new products, or identify opportunities faster and more accurately than humans alone, potentially impacting company success and market trends.

parallel file systems technical

A parallel file system is a way of storing and retrieving large amounts of data so many computers can read and write at the same time without slowing each other down. Think of it like a supermarket with many checkout lanes sharing the same inventory: it speeds up heavy workloads, improves reliability, and lowers delays for businesses that rely on fast data processing, which can affect costs, service quality, and competitive ability.

lustre technical

Lustre denotes an object's shine or the general appeal and perceived quality of a company, product, or industry; in finance it’s most often used metaphorically to describe reputation, attractiveness to customers or investors, and market standing. Investors care because a strong lustre—like a well-polished surface—can draw more buyers, support higher prices and make recovery easier after setbacks, while a lack of lustre can signal fading demand or diminished confidence.

beegfs technical

BeeGFS is a high-performance distributed file system that lets many computers share and access large amounts of data quickly, like a very fast, coordinated networked filing cabinet spread across multiple machines. For investors, its presence signals that a business can handle heavy data workloads efficiently—important for companies working in areas such as cloud services, scientific computing, AI training, or media processing—because it can improve product performance, reduce infrastructure bottlenecks, and influence operational costs and competitive positioning.

gpus technical

GPUs are specialized computer chips originally designed to draw images on screens but now widely used to speed up tasks like artificial intelligence, scientific calculations, and data analysis. For investors, GPU demand is a signal about where computing power is being deployed — rising GPU sales can boost makers of chips and the datacenters that use them, influence supply chains and prices, and indicate which companies have a performance edge, much like a restaurant gaining an advantage by hiring many fast, skilled cooks.

New systems deliver proven and affordable high-performance for most demanding workloads including AI, HPC and databases

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- NetApp® (NASDAQ: NTAP), the Intelligent Data Infrastructure company, today announced the release of the next generation of NetApp EF-Series storage systems, built to power the most performance‑intensive workloads at scale. The introduction of EF50 and EF80 helps enterprises and neoclouds meet the growing demands of AI, high-performance computing (HPC), and transactional databases, including in emerging use cases like sovereign AI clouds and AI-powered manufacturing.

“Data is the key component to delivering business value for enterprises, underpinning performance-hungry workloads like AI or databases,” said Sandeep Singh, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Enterprise Storage at NetApp. “As businesses contend with ever-increasing data volumes and performance-intensive applications such as AI model training, AI inferencing and high-performance computing, they need infrastructure that delivers speed, scalability and efficiency without added complexity. NetApp delivers a comprehensive portfolio that addresses every stage of the AI data pipeline from collecting and preparing data to feeding it to GenAI models that produce business insights. With the new EF-Series systems, purpose-built for extreme performance, we’re enabling customers to deploy and scale high-throughput, low-latency workloads quickly and efficiently, while reducing data center footprint and operational overhead.”

Coupled with high-performance parallel file systems like Lustre or BeeGFS, the new EF50 and EF80 systems accelerate HPC simulations and keep GPUs fully utilized with high-performance scratch space, helping organizations unlock new value and competitive advantage at the right price. Customers ranging from neocloud providers driving AI innovation to movie studios managing massive media libraries will benefit from not only performance and scalability but also robust security measures to safeguard sensitive information and prevent data loss.

The new EF-Series storage systems deliver over 110GBps of read throughput and 55GBps of write throughput, a 250 percent improvement over previous generations. With a power efficiency of 63.7GBps per KW and 1.5PB of storage in 2U, the new systems ensure reliable, high-performance with efficient rack density and an affordable cost. With EF-Series, organizations can:

• Achieve high performance for data-intensive workloads, scaling capacity without sacrificing efficiency or latency
• Balance budget requirements with high-performance needs to make better decisions faster
• Simplify management and operational complexity with affordable block storage, streamlined deployment and support from NetApp’s technical experts.

“As we navigate the AI era, many enterprises are finding that they need to maximize their raw performance to extract the most value from their data,” said Clayton Vipond, Senior Solution Architect at CDW. “The refreshed NetApp EF-Series deliver the throughput and capacity businesses need to scale high-powered workloads that transform data into insights and outcomes.”

"NetApp's EF-Series systems give Teradata the storage performance needed to support our most demanding workloads," said Sumeet Arora, Chief Product Officer, Teradata. "We appreciate that NetApp continues to invest in this technology, and with the enhanced performance of the new models, we look forward to exploring opportunities to reduce infrastructure complexity and support the AI and data modernization initiatives our customers care about."

“By delivering a high-performance storage system that supports parallel file systems like Lustre and BeeGFS, NetApp is making its mark as emerging industries, such as neocloud, emerge to support the AI-Era,” said Simon Robinson, Principal Analyst at Omdia. “Our research validates that AI workloads require a level of raw performance unmatched by any mainstream business workload to date. With the new EF-series systems, NetApp is delivering a solution that addresses the performance needs of large-scale AI projects, whether model training or inference.”

The updated EF-Series builds on decades of durability and reliability from NetApp. With more than 1 million installations, it has a proven track record that customers can rely on.

Additional Resources

• NetApp E-Series Hybrid and EF-Series All Flash: Built for Dedicated, High-Bandwidth Applications
• Power your AI Workloads and Data at the Speed of Innovation

About NetApp

For more than three decades, NetApp has helped the world’s leading organizations navigate change – from the rise of enterprise storage to the intelligent era defined by data and AI. Today, NetApp is the Intelligent Data Infrastructure company, helping customers turn data into a catalyst for innovation, resilience, and growth.

At the heart of that infrastructure is the NetApp data platform – the unified, enterprise-grade, intelligent foundation that connects, protects, and activates data across every cloud, workload, and environment. Built on the proven power of NetApp ONTAP, our leading data management software and OS, and enhanced by automation through the AI Data Engine and AFX, it delivers observability, resilience, and intelligence at scale.

Disaggregated by design, the NetApp data platform separates storage, services, and control so enterprises can modernize faster, scale efficiently, and innovate without lock-in. As the only enterprise storage platform natively embedded in the world’s largest clouds, it gives organizations the freedom to run any workload anywhere with consistent performance, governance, and protection.

With NetApp, data is always ready – ready to defend against threats, ready to power AI, and ready to drive the next breakthrough. That’s why the world’s most forward-thinking enterprises trust NetApp to turn intelligence into advantage.

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Media Contact:

Kenya Hayes

NetApp

kenya.hayes@netapp.com

Investor Contact:

Kris Newton

NetApp

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Source: NetApp