NetApp Ontap 9 Software Simplifies Transition to Hybrid Cloud

NetApp, Inc. announced the ONTAP 9 OS, an advanced in enterprise data management software that combines new levels of simplicity and flexibility with powerful capabilities and efficiencies.

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With ONTAP 9 software, enterprises can integrate the best of traditional and emerging technologies, incorporating flash, the cloud and software-defined architectures to build a Data Fabric foundation across on-premises and cloud resources.

“NetApp technology allows us to be nimble and react quickly to the often volatile changes in the energy sector,” said Hercu Rabsatt, director, infrastructure and service management, Mansfield Oil Corp. “NetApp has been a key partner in helping us revolutionize our infrastructure for competitive advantage, tying our technology to our business strategy and remediating areas of risk. We’ve had zero downtime for our core business applications since moving them to NetApp ONTAP software. We can always service our customers.“

Optimized for flash
ONTAP 9 software is optimized for flash with improved performance and capacity utilization. With this announcement, the company becomes the first all-flash array provider to offer customers 15TB SSDs, which are 50% larger than the largest HDD available today. The firm also announced the FlashAdvantage 3-4-5 program, which includes ta guaranteed efficiency reduction of 4:1. This program makes it simple, cost effective, and low risk for customers to adopt flash.

New inline data compaction enables more data to fit in a smaller footprint and brings down the cost of flash beyond traditional compression and deduplication. This capability increases efficiency and makes firm’s all-flash systems extremely cost-effective compared to HDD drive-based systems.

“As effective flash dollar-per-gigabyte costs drop, flash deployment in the enterprise is accelerating,” said Eric Burgener, research director, storage practice, IDC. “NetApp’s release of the industry’s first 15TB flash drive, combined with new storage efficiency technology features in ONTAP 9, continues to drive that cost down in a flash-optimized, enterprise storage platform that is well suited for the type of dense mixed workload consolidation that customers are increasingly looking to their trusted suppliers to deliver.“

“We’ve helped enterprise clients leverage flash to deliver greater performance, scalability, and availability. With the advent of ONTAP 9, 15TB SSDs and the FlashAdvantage 3-4-5 program, our clients will benefit from greater simplicity, flexibility, and cost savings and build a strong foundation to maximize the business value of IT,” said Jason Anderson, chief architect, Datalink Corp.

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Simplicity, flexibility and security across flash, disk and cloud deployments
Users of ONTAP 9 software have three options to meet their needs. It is targeted for general on-premises enterprise use, ONTAP Cloud (formerly NetApp Cloud ONTAP) delivers enterprise data management in the cloud. The ONTAP Select offers a software-only data management solution.

ONTAP 9 benefits include:

• Simplicity — Easy to set-up and manage, ONTAP 9 can be deployed and serving data for critical workloads in as few as ten minutes. Also, with enhanced system monitoring, enterprises can use it to centrally manage performance, capacity and data protection across their IT environment.

• Flexibility — The ONTAP 9 software is a platform for workload consolidation. The platform offers common data services across general purpose server hardware deployments as software defined storage in addition to firm’s engineered systems, converged infrastructure, third-party arrays, next-to-the-cloud systems, and the cloud.

• Security — Customers can achieve up to 100 times greater security against drive failures and meet stringent data retention policies with new triple-parity RAID protection and expanded storage encryption and compliance features.

“Supporting the Large Hadron Collider, the biggest particle accelerator in the world, and its experiments to study the basic constituents of matter, CERN’s database group has been using NetApp products since 2007,” said Miroslav Potocky, manager, database storage service, IT department, CERN, one of the world’s largest centers for scientific research. “Since we started using NetApp clustered FAS systems, they have provided a scalable, stable, high performance environment for our databases, some of which have workloads with up to one million changes per second. By using NetApp infrastructure running ONTAP we are able to provide a solution for our most demanding storage use-cases and support CERN’s research program towards a better understanding of matter.“

“Customers struggling to add flash and cloud capabilities see ONTAP 9 as a powerful consolidation stress reliever that can be deployed with fewer skilled IT resources,” said Lee Caswell, VP, product, solutions and services marketing, NetApp. “ONTAP 9 delivers real economic value that reduces the cost of flash, introduces a cost-effective software consumption model, and standardizes data management across disk, flash and cloud resources. With ONTAP 9, we are helping customers and partners convert our feature innovations to business value.“

Additional resources:
Blog about ONTAP 9 from Lee Caswell
Technical details about ONTAP 9
Customer stories about Mansfield Oil and CERN
FlashAdvantage 3-4-5 program