NetApp has announced its next big update to its data management software, ONTAP, with version 9.7. ONTAP allows organizations to build a secure, powerful and intelligent storage infrastructure with the ability to deploy storage (via hardware storage systems, software-defined storage, and the cloud) while unifying data management across all of them.
NetApp has announced its next big update to its data management software, ONTAP, with version 9.7. ONTAP allows organizations to build a secure, powerful and intelligent storage infrastructure with the ability to deploy storage (via hardware storage systems, software-defined storage, and the cloud) while unifying data management across all of them.
Under the theme “letting users do more with less time and effort”, ONTAP 9.7 has been updated to significantly improved the way users manage their ONTAP environment as the enhanced interface now displays important system information about capacity, hardware health, networking, and performance history using up to one year of data. In addition, only one screen is used (and needed) for provisioning LUNs or NAS volumes.
NetApp has made ONTAP very user-friendly, as you don’t need to be a storage professional or IT expert to configure and manage the system. For example, Active IQ Unified Manager will help improve admin productivity in larger environments with multiple clusters, and you can receive notifications and manage huge amounts of data from a single dashboard to proactively and quickly address potential storage issues so they don’t become problems. Moreover, new Unified Manager features provide insights on security risks and compliance.
With NetApp StorageGRID systems in this ONTAP release is the capability to simultaneously mirror your tiered data out to multiple clouds.
Also new in this release is the ability to simultaneously mirror tiered data out to multiple clouds, which allows users to store data at multiple cloud providers for added resiliency. As a result, this can simplify the overly-complicated process of changing cloud providers.
Other features indicated by NetApp include:
- Securing data: ONTAP has a strong portfolio of security capabilities that protect users from ransomware attacks, data theft, and unauthorized system access. New with ONTAP 9.7, users can protect their data by automatically enabling data-at-rest encryption for new volumes when an encryption key manager is configured on the cluster.
- Business continuity: For enterprise applications that need non-stop data access, users can now use their existing network infrastructure for synchronous mirroring with MetroCluster.
- Protecting data in NVMe environments: Those using NVMe over Fabric to further improve the performance of enterprise business applications, users can now get zero data loss protection (RPO=0) for NVMe environment using SnapMirror Synchronous replication.
Availability
NetApp ONTAP 9.7 is slated for a release sometime in November.
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