NetApp Insight 2025: Keith Aasen Unveils the AI-Ready NetApp AFX — The Future of Scalable Storage
13m
At NetApp Insight 2025, Stephen Foskett sits down with Keith Aasen, Product Manager at NetApp, to discuss the debut of the company’s most powerful storage system yet—the NetApp AFX. Designed from the ground up for massive scalability, high throughput, and AI-driven workloads, AFX combines the familiar ONTAP data management layer with an entirely reengineered backend architecture. Supporting up to 128 nodes, AFX delivers terabytes per second of throughput and exabyte-scale capacity, with automated workload balancing, zero-gravity migrations, and a fully Ethernet-based switched fabric powered by Cisco. With support for NFS v4 with pNFS and S3, AFX provides parallel file system–level performance without the complexity, making it ideal for modern AI training and inference environments. As Foskett and Aasen explain, AFX forms the foundation for NetApp’s AI Data Engine, bringing intelligent metadata, scalability, and automation to the next generation of enterprise data management.