Nvidia GTC 2026: NetApp Unveils New High-Performance EF-Series Models

NetApp, an intelligent data infrastructure company, announced the release of the next gen 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, SVP and GM, enterprise storage, 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 100GBps of read throughput and 57GBps of write throughput, a 250% improvement over previous gens, and 1.5PB of storage in 2U, ensuring 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 that they need to maximize their raw performance to extract the most value from their data,” said Clayton Vipond, senior solution architect, 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.”

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.