NetApp Novus splits pNFS metadata from AFF A90 data nodes for 100 TB/s AI factory target

At INSIGHT 2026 NetApp announced Novus, a disaggregated storage architecture that moves metadata into a Data Director tier on qualified Supermicro servers while AFF A90 systems running ONTAP serve data. NetApp claims a design target above 100 TB/s of aggregate throughput and zettabyte-scale growth, and says the first configuration is orderable now.

• Metadata runs on x86 Data Director; AFF A90 HA pairs act as data nodes
• Clients are stock Linux pNFS using NFSv4.2 Flex Files and GPUDirect Storage
• Omdia modeling projects 100 TB/s reads and dozens of exabytes of capacity
• The 100 TB/s figure works out to about 50,000 GPUs at 2GB/s each