Today at NetApp Insight in Las Vegas, NetApp announced an update to its NetApp ONTAP 9 software, six new flash systems, and expanded public cloud support. These announcements will help customers as they transition to the hybrid cloud that more and more companies will leverage as the industry moves forward. NetApp is also pointing out that they have been optimizing the data center for flash with support of industry-leading connectivity options.
Today at NetApp Insight in Las Vegas, NetApp announced an update to its NetApp ONTAP 9 software, six new flash systems, and expanded public cloud support. These announcements will help customers as they transition to the hybrid cloud that more and more companies will leverage as the industry moves forward. NetApp is also pointing out that they have been optimizing the data center for flash with support of industry-leading connectivity options.
Back in May, NetApp released version 9 or its ONTAP software. ONTAP 9 came with capabilities to combine traditional and emerging technologies. The latest updates are leveraging these capabilities utilizing a NAS Container, volume encryption, public cloud support, and supporting all-flash severs. ONTAP 9’s new features and capabilities, along with its support for hybrid and all-flash severs, will help companies embrace changes and transform their IT. This in turn will lead to more growth and more efficient use of data.
New features in ONTAP 9 include:
- NetApp ONTAP FlexGroup is a massively scalable, high performance NAS container ideal for the latest generation of applications in the EDA, high-tech, oil and gas, and media and entertainment industries. FlexGroup allows customers to scale a single container up to 20PB and 400 billion files.
- NetApp Volume Encryption offers granular, volume-level, software-based, encryption for data on any type of drives across AFF, FAS, or ONTAP Select systems without requiring special additional self-encrypting disks.
- ONTAP Cloud support for Microsoft Azure. ONTAP Cloud is software-defined storage running in Azure that enables customers to use advanced ONTAP data services to efficiently share, move, protect and manage their cloud data. Customers can now gain greater infrastructure flexibility by integrating Azure cloud services into their enterprise data fabric.
- ONTAP Select now supports all-flash commodity servers.
Along with updates to the software, NetApp has refreshed its ONTAP-powered all-flash and hybrid arrays. NetApp is releasing six new arrays, including what they are calling the industry’s fastest unified all-flash systems. NetApp is offering highly scalable hybrid flash arrays, and states that all the arrays will feature simpler set-up and serviceability.
New features and capabilities include:
- The AFF A700 all-flash system, designed for high performance and configuration flexibility; and the AFF A300 all-flash system, optimized for midrange all-flash configurations. These new systems offer up to twice the performance of prior NetApp systems at half the latency. The systems are easy to set-up in under 10 minutes, have greater serviceability and provide expanded support for multi-stream-write (MSW) and 15TB SSDs.
- New hybrid flash systems including the FAS8200 for enterprise workloads and the FAS2650 and FAS2620, optimized for small-enterprises and mid-size businesses. The new FAS systems offer dramatically increased speed and responsiveness with up to 200% higher performance than that of earlier NetApp systems and integrated NVMe NetApp Flash Cache intelligent caching.
- The new FAS9000 for business critical workloads, which gives customers the ability to easily scale-up to 14PB in a system and scale out to 172PB in a cluster. This capability provides customers with the right size solution for their needs today and growth options for the future.
- The industry’s first support of leading connectivity with 32Gb Fibre Channel and 40Gb Ethernet, in addition to the 12Gb SAS-3 storage connection, optimizing the infrastructure for flash.
- Intelligent modular design for AFF A700 and FAS9000 to enhance reliability, availability, and serviceability, and simplify future upgrades.
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