Data Fabric is an integral part of NetApp, with over 300,000 systems and software deployments. Today the company announced that it is making some major upgrades and enhancements to its Data Fabric with new software releases including NetApp SolidFire Element, NetApp StorageGRID Webscale, NetApp ONTAP and OnCommand Insight. According to NetApp, these solutions are key elements to its Data Fabric and deliver consistent and integrated hybrid cloud data services to help customers to accelerate and protect data, reduce cost and easily build next generation architectures.
Data Fabric is an integral part of NetApp, with over 300,000 systems and software deployments. Today the company announced that it is making some major upgrades and enhancements to its Data Fabric with new software releases including NetApp SolidFire Element, NetApp StorageGRID Webscale, NetApp ONTAP and OnCommand Insight. According to NetApp, these solutions are key elements to its Data Fabric and deliver consistent and integrated hybrid cloud data services to help customers to accelerate and protect data, reduce cost and easily build next generation architectures.
For some time now the focus has shifted to data. It has moved from an important though inert part of business to the promise of key insights such as new revenue streams, better customers support, more efficient business methods, and overall cost reductions/savings. This is putting pressure on many organizations to become data-centric and find solutions that help them through this transformation. NetApp states that its Data Fabric is able to offer a holistic approach that is secure, efficient, future-proof and provides freedom of choice. Major aspects of the Data Fabric are SolidFire Element OS 10 and StorageGRID Webscale 11. They help to simplify the creation of a next generation cloud architecture.
The main updates to NetApp’s Data Fabric include the following:
- NetApp SolidFire:
- Data Fabric integration across operating systems – New SnapMirror integration supports data movement from Element OS systems to ONTAP systems across the data fabric. Remote data is available for disaster protection/recovery as well as other use cases such as development, analytics, or centralized archiving.
- Align business goals to IT service levels – SolidFire Element OS lets companies consume agile, software-defined storage in a manner that best aligns with their business goals. Whether it’s SolidFire All-flash Arrays, FlexPod SF, or NetApp HCI, Element OS enables customers to achieve operational transformation through on-demand scaling, API-driven automation, and guaranteed performance. New user-defined QoS policies further simplifies management of guaranteed performance in rapidly evolving private clouds.
- NetApp HCI:
- Performance, scale and cost savings – the world’s first enterprise-scale hyper converged solution will be generally available in October 2017. Built on SolidFire innovation, NetApp HCI gives enterprises, mid-sized businesses, and service providers the confidence to easily consolidate all workloads, scale in ways that won’t strand resources, and deliver the performance required by next-generation applications.
- StorageGRID Webscale 11:
- Empower users – Tight integration with Amazon Web Services enables easy implementation of hybrid cloud data pipelines with AWS, instantly mirror on-premises data with Amazon S3 using StorageGRID Webscale CloudMirror Technology.
- Increase efficiency – Leverage serverless computing via notifications for data services such as Elastic Map Reduce, Rekognition, Elastic Search – even with on-premises storage.
NetApp is also upgrading its OS to ONTAP 9.3 (for a fairly extensive review of 9.1, check out our review of the NetApp AFF A200). As we’ve said, ONTAP 9 is one of the industry’s leading enterprise data management software solutions. Touted by NetApp as being able to deliver new levels of simplicity and flexibility with powerful data management capabilities and storage efficiencies. The updates in 9.3 revolve around NetApp’s Data Fabric and how to modernize storage through data management with faster, simpler and more secure software.
Key features in ONTAP 9.3 include:
- Enhance performance — easier performance assurance with Adaptive QoS that simplifies set up with streamlined application of QoS policies and automatically adapts QoS levels to changes in the workload. 40 percent increased performance compared to previous versions with software optimizations and path parallelization to deliver more IOPS and lower latency.
- Create efficiencies and save money – 30 percent increased capacity savings by optimizing deduplication. This improved ONTAP efficiency will be incorporated in the NetApp All Flash Capacity guarantee which provides assurance users will achieve workload specific capacity savings or we will make up the difference.
- Enhance security and compliance – stronger security and new compliance capabilities with external key management for NVE and multi-factor authentication. Users can also apply compliance policies for legal holds and event-based retention.
- Harness the Power of the Hybrid Cloud with Data Fabric
OnCommand Insight with new cloud cost monitoring provides a complete picture of IT infrastructure, regardless of where it resides, on-premise or in the cloud, to help companies harness the power of the hybrid cloud using Data Fabric.
- OnCommand Insight cloud cost capabilities enable users to:
- Monitor — Gain visibility of cloud spend across departments, lines of business and applications
- Control — Control, improve and enforce cloud spend behavior across the organization
- Optimize – Save cost by leveraging the most efficient vendor pricing structure
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