NetApp targets E-Series at AI and neoclouds with EF50 and EF80

Targeting neoclouds

Sandeep Singh, senior vice-president and general manager for storage with NetApp, said: “We are delivering proven and affordable high-performance, extreme performance, for the most performance-intensive and demanding workloads.

“That includes AI use cases inclusive of AI training, AI inferencing, HPC workloads and transactional database workloads, not only for the enterprises, but also for neoclouds, sovereign AI clouds and AI-powered manufacturing use cases.”

Singh said EF-Series is intended to serve as the high-speed “scratch space” in a tiered architecture, often paired with parallel file systems such as Lustre or BeeGFS. This allows the E-Series to act as a high-performance engine at the front end, while larger, more persistent data stores sit behind it.

E-Series heritage

The E-Series has occupied a unique space within NetApp. Its DNA doesn’t come from the company's famous WAFL-based filers, but from the 2011 acquisition of Engenio (from LSI). This gave NetApp a much-needed block-storage play and for workloads where the bells and whistles of Ontap were actually a hindrance.

E-Series has been a quiet workhorse, often found working with offerings from IBM, Dell, and Teradata. While NetApp’s primary AFF/FAS lines focus on unified storage with heavy data reduction, the E-Series has remained the go-to for dedicated, high-duty-cycle applications. Its SANtricity operating system favours raw performance and simplicity.

Powering the rack

As the focus in the datacentre shifts from mere capacity to power draw, E-Series density is a primary defence. Singh noted that storage draw is a “small fraction” of what a rack of GPUs pulls. By feeding GPUs more efficiently and reducing idle time, the net effect is a more streamlined, if still power-hungry, AI infrastructure.

Singh said: “When you put it in the context of GPUs, these arrays enable the GPUs to not be sitting idle and starving. And to that part of it, if you can optimise it, you’re reducing wasted power and boosting utilisation of those GPUs. That also goes into the equation for customers.”

This release puts NetApp into tighter competition with the likes of Pure Storage and its FlashArray//XL, as well as Dell’s Project Lightning. While Pure focuses on a unified architecture, NetApp’s strategy remains “horses for courses”, using E-Series for raw throughput while keeping ONTAP for general-purpose enterprise data management.