NetApp has added a dose of cloudification to its product lines with a series of announcements covering its core ONTAP software, SolidFire all-flash array software, and Keystone subscription offering.
The company is now describing itself as cloud-led, data-centric and operating in a hybrid on-premises and multi-public cloud environment.
NetApp’s new president, César Cernuda, hired in May, emitted this prepared quote: “With its rich data-centric software innovation, NetApp is uniquely positioned to help organisations quickly adapt and sustainably transform in today’s hybrid cloud world. Now, we make it easier for them to develop applications in the cloud, move applications to the cloud, or create cloud-like experiences on premises.”
The latest version of ONTAP, v9.8, adds:
- FlexCache support for SMB,
- SnapMirror Business Continuity (SNBC) provides continuous availability with instant failover for workloads like Oracle and SAP,
- S3 protocol support for small-scale object workloads complementing separate StorageGRID object storage offering,
- IPsec inflight data encryption,
- FabricPool cloud tiering gets FAS hard disk drive systems as an added hot tier source,
- Sending snapshot copies to S3 object storage on-premises or in the public cloud,
- One-click firmware upgrades,
- Improved file system analytics.
NetApp said ONTAP storage efficiency had increased by “up to” 33 per cent, without providing details. It claimed (access) temperature-sensitive storage efficiency further optimised cold data to reduce a customer’s storage footprint.
The SolidFire Element all-flash array’s noisy neighbour-killing software is now available in SW-only form to run on commodity server hardware. This new Enterprise SDS (eSDS) offering is packaged in containers and contains selectable components. Qualified server hardware is listed in NetApp’s Interoperability Matrix Tool.
The latest Element SW version adds:
- Drive lock + software encryption,
- Software encryption at rest,
- Multilayer volume security with access group + CHAP + VLANs,
- Multifactor authentication,
- Centralised key management through industry-standard protocols.
An updated Keystone Flex subscription provides so-called “pay-as-you-grow” pricing and public cloud integration through the NetApp partner ecosystem. NetApp claimed: “Rapid service adoption with field-proven deployments enables us to bring the cloud to you in as little as 2 weeks.”
