Even though the main purpose of this event is to highlight and introduce new products, my personal highlight was meeting so many wonderful people, having great chats, catching up and talking about non-technical things.

But coincidentally, a few new products were launched this year 🙂

After talking briefly about disaggregated architecture at INSIGHT 2024, the product is finished now and it is called AFX series!
And do you want to know what is the most fascinating part of it? It runs ONTAP!
Let me explain: A proven track record of being the most secure Storage OS on the Planet. You can Snapmirror or SVM migrate your existing workloads into this new system, or test-drive it with FlexCache… WOW! So adopting this new technology does not take any longer than rackmounting the new gear!

What is it?
Basically, it’s a new design to scale further and better, the new limits include:

• 128 A1K Storage Controllers (ONTAP systems)
• 52 DS224 Storage Enclosures (Disk Shelfs)
• 10 DX50 Data Compute Nodes, optional (AIDE)
• 2 Cisco Nexus N9K-C9364D Switches with 64x 400Gig Ethernet

Please compare this to the old cMode Limits with up to 24 nodes in a single cluster, each node requiring at least a couple of disk drives, this system goes way beyond anything that was available before!

Also be aware that this technology can not be:

A wise man once said “I love it when a plan comes together”…

Minimum config:

This is what the minimum config looks like: 2 HA Pairs of AFX 1K, 2 Switches and 1 fully populated Disk Shelf. That’s all…

Hardware Overview:

So what’s next?
Maybe we should take an in-depth look at the new DX50 nodes and see how the analytics work and what they can provide.

If you want to know more, look at:
– AFX Datasheet
– Sandeeps Blog Entry