New Version of NetApp Clustered Data Ontap

NetApp, Inc. announced a new version of its storage operating system – clustered Data ONTAP.

The software gives organizations and cloud service providers the capability to rapidly and cost effectively deliver new services and capacity with maximum application uptime. Clustered Data ONTAP 8.2 cuts through the performance, availability, and efficiency limits of traditional hardware silos, empowering IT to nondisruptively align the storage infrastructure with changing business and application demands.

Capabilities in clustered Data ONTAP:

• Nondisruptive operations with greater than five-nines reliability (99.999%), providing continuous data access during scheduled downtime and dynamic load balancing without disruptive data migrations
• Scalability with up to 69PB of storage and 24 controller nodes, 49,000 LUNs, 12,000 NAS volumes supporting over 100,000 clients and single container up to 20PB
• Storage and operational efficiency within a unified and multi-tenant architecture that meets the needs of enterprises, small, and mid-sized businesses

Additional features and enhancements:

• Granular QoS to meet application performance service levels in multi-tenant and multi-workload environments for SAN and NAS
• NetApp SnapVault disk-to-disk backup: compression, and deduplication savings are preserved over the network and restores of petabyte-scale datasets, applications, and VMs are instantly available
• Cost-effective and flexible adoption models including single-node and switch-less configurations that enable nondisruptive and on-demand infrastructure scaling
• Storage VMs that support software-defined initiatives and enable agility by delivering storage services from pooled heterogeneous hardware resources
• Enhanced Microsoft virtual environments with built-in support for SMB3.0 and ODX delivering superior management, scalability, and agility with Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V
• Enhanced VMware shared infrastructure and hybrid cloud environments with expanded support of VMware vSphere Storage APIs, Horizon Suite, and vCloud Suite
• Continuous data access during controller upgrades
• Storage protocols including SMB 3.0, pNFS v4.1, iSCSI, FCoE, and FC
• New assessment, migration, and optimization services, plus enhanced implementation services
• Automation and monitoring enhancements for the NetApp OnCommand Management Suite

NetApp’s Vision for Software-Defined Storage
Software-defined storage (SDS) is one component of the emerging software-defined data center (SDDC) model, which focuses on agility in delivering IT services to application owners while improving operational and IT resource efficiency. Akin to virtual machines and server virtualization, clustered Data ONTAP abstracts physical storage into a set of Storage Virtual Machines (SVM; formerly known as vServer). This allows NetApp to deliver native multi-tenant, policy-based storage services via programmable APIs and application integrations. Clustered Data ONTAP is a storage and data management solution that makes the promise of SDS attainable.

"CIOs are moving from builders of applications and operators of data centers to brokers of information services to the business," said Jay Kidd, SVP and CTO, NetApp. "This new role requires technologies that can speed IT response time and drive operational and resource efficiency. Clustered Data ONTAP fills this need today, providing the key building block that delivers the benefits of software-defined storage models and will replace existing slow and inefficient siloed approaches. Our new software gives IT unsurpassed agility, including the flexibility to deploy across multiple platforms."

Quality of service and data protection enhancements help IT to automate application provisioning based on service level and to realize operational benefits from pre-set policy-based security and delegation. These features and capabilities enable IT teams to scale infrastructure to fit business needs, decrease the cost to run applications, and achieve higher levels of operational efficiency.

Customer Momentum with Clustered Data ONTAP
Clustered Data ONTAP offers value to both the enterprise private cloud and public cloud service providers. The software’s unified architecture services a range of workloads – from the most demanding to the most unique across virtualized environments, scale-out NAS, and enterprise applications. During the past year companies across all industries have adopted clustered Data ONTAP with a 4x increase in clustered nodes resulting in 100% quarter over quarter growth of deployments. Cloud providers, whose business reputation depends on continuously running operations, are bringing centralized management to the data center with FlexPod from NetApp and Cisco with clustered Data ONTAP.

Areas of high adoption
of clustered Data ONTAP include:

• Virtualized environments. Organizations use private clouds to consolidate multiple applications into a shared environment, so IT is delivered like a service provider. Clustered Data ONTAP’s unified architecture services a range of workloads on a standard platform.
• Scale-out NAS. Traditionally, NAS has been used to meet the requirements for storing files on a network for access by a few or for backup purposes. With clustered Data ONTAP, customers can grow from a few terabytes to tens of petabytes without reconfiguring running applications.
• Enterprise applications. As IT becomes integral to business operations, the impact of downtime on tier 1 applications negatively affects budgets and productivity. Clustered Data ONTAP improves service levels over the lifecycle of an application with the ability to dynamically assign, promote and retire storage resources.

Clustered Data ONTAP continues to deliver up to 50% greater storage efficiency than non NetApp environments. The software also delivers greater than 99.999% availability as reported by AutoSupport, NetApp’s global remote automation and predictive guidance solution which leverages an intelligent data analytics engine to identify at risk systems. Clustered Data ONTAP innovations are protected by more than 1,500 U.S. and international patents and patent applications.

Customer Fueled by Clustered Data ONTAP

Dominion Enterprises
Dominion Enterprises, a media and information services company, maintains websites for 40 market-leading websites with a total of more than 20 million unique monthly visitors. Each of Dominion’s customers requires complex data storage infrastructure that support both SAN and NAS workloads. With clustered Data ONTAP, Dominion can easily move huge volumes of data – photos, videos, and other content – independent of the underlying hardware, allowing the IT team to segregate businesses, create different storage tiers, and promote or demote volumes, all transparent within a single namespace.

Cirrity
Clustered Data ONTAP is for service providers consolidating multiple applications onto a shared environment. Customer Cirrity LLC, a cloud service provider for regulated industries such as healthcare, provides a backbone for its managed service provider customers, making time to service critical workloads unpredictable, and workload isolation paramount. They start up hundreds of virtual machines a week, and balance the workload across the cluster. Clustered Data ONTAP allows Cirrity to get customers up and running in a few hours and guarantee 100% uptime.

New End-to-End Services
Offerings for Clustered Data ONTAP
NetApp unveiled new and refreshed services, available from NetApp and its partners that help customers realize the benefits of clustered Data ONTAP faster and increase the return on their storage investments. With clustered Data ONTAP services, businesses can align IT to their strategic goals, deploy validated architectures, accelerate their path to non-disruptive operations, and achieve high levels of operational excellence.

As part of today’s announcement, NetApp also announced the general availability of Flash Cache 2 controller-attached PCIe intelligent caching modules, which increase flash module capacity by 100%, to 2TB, compared to previous generations. The new flash technology, based on patented and patent-pending flash expertise, boosts performance for workloads that are random read intensive, such as file services, messaging, OLTP databases, and server and desktop virtualization.

Terri McClure, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group, said: "IT is under tremendous pressure to adapt in order to combat the challenge of today’s massive data growth while meeting expectations for fast response times to adapt to new business requirements. Business are seeking storage infrastructure solutions that deliver agility and availability, that ensure the fast provisioning of underlying IT services to keep applications up and running as well as bring new applications on board quickly. And doing so in a manner that ensures applications can coexist in the same infrastructure without the worry of a rogue application taking resources from business critical ones. With clustered Data ONTAP, NetApp is virtualizing the underlying storage infrastructure in such a way as to enable this type of flexible and efficient services-oriented data storage infrastructure."

Dan Timko, president and CTO, Cirrity, said: "Business continuity is critical to our reputation. The ability to operate in clustered Data ONTAP means we can move data from storage system to storage system for maintenance or other activities without affecting users. There is also significant advantage in seamlessly adding NetApp systems as needed without having to buy big metal up front."

Tom Skidmore, chief architect, Dominion Enterprises, said: "We have to offer always on-operations, but still need the flexibility to add or move storage to address business requirements, such as migrating data from super high-performance, performance, or value-based disk storage. Migrating customers on and off storage for replacements or upgrades was historically a huge friction point and a costly process. Clustered Data ONTAP has resulted in greater operational agility, fewer data migrations, and far less overhead."

Rob Gee, data center solutions architect, Logicalis Group, said: "Storage efficiency, nondisruptive operations, and scalability all provide the foundation for cost-effective cloud services for our customers, making clustered Data ONTAP technology a critical part of the Logicalis cloud offering. Our technology collaboration with NetApp provides efficient private and public cloud solutions that enable our customers to start with a smaller investment and seamlessly scale as their business requires, with no interruption in their operations."

Akihiro Matsukura, MD, TOKAI Communications Corp., said: "It is crucial for organizations today to respond quickly to diversifying data-management needs in the era of the cloud. With clustered Data ONTAP – and its scale-out architecture, high scalability, and non-disruptive operations – TOKAI Communications continues to provide high quality, value-added services for our customers. NetApp’s new release of clustered Data ONTAP will bring significant benefits to the data management solution market and business impact to organizations."

Robin Schöpe, storage engineer, Ultra Consulting Network GmbH, said: "IT agility is a conversation we frequently have with our customers. The challenge is how to make it real given the constraints business puts on IT today. Clustered Data ONTAP software combined with our ability to deliver and support advanced IT consulting, provides our customers with a proven solution to make nondisruptive operations a reality and adapt to ever-changing market needs."

Satinder Sethi, VP, data center solutions, Cisco Sytems, Inc., said: "With the release of clustered Data ONTAP 8.2, NetApp continues its heritage of innovation with Data ONTAP. Cisco continues to expand our joint solutions built upon the Cisco Unified Computing System and Nexus 5500 Unified Fabric product families. We are pleased with the ongoing success of FlexPod and other Cisco-NetApp deployment options."

Sanjay Katyal, VP, global alliances and OEMs, VMware, Inc., said: "VMware and NetApp’s technology partnership enables our joint customers to increase the agility of their IT infrastructure using seamlessly integrated storage within a software-defined data center. NetApp’s clustered Data ONTAP with VMware vCloud Suite and VMware Horizon Suite enables on-demand access to storage resources, along with quality of service and security isolation in a shared infrastructure environment, helping customers increase operational efficiency and reduce infrastructure costs for their private cloud environments."