NetApp Ontap Release Menu: New Appetizers, Main Courses, and Desserts

By Jon Jacob, senior product marketing Manager, ONTAP data management software, NetApp Inc.

I bet you have a favorite restaurant that you enjoy visiting regularly. What stands out about it? You probably look forward to enjoying dishes you’ve had for many years as well as new ones that are added to the menu. The chef pleasantly surprises you with an unexpected twist on a familiar choice. And you’ve had great times there with family and friends.

My favorite place is an Italian restaurant downtown on Main Street. They have a wide selection of pastas, they make bread salad (panzanella) with fresh chopped tomatoes, and they’re constantly rolling out new desserts. Plus, it’s convenient, a good value, and served by a friendly staff.

Well, at the NetApp, Inc. ‘restaurant,’ our menu for the NetApp ONTAP ecosystem delivers on all those same qualities. We specialize in applying our 25+ years of innovation to help your business get the most out of your data. And we continue to expand our portfolio of data management services. We want to satisfy all the cravings our customers have for building – and protecting – a unified hybrid cloud that can adapt to their business requirements, today and in the future.

New with ONTAP: 5 key areas
So, what’s new on our menu? In our latest ONTAP software release, we’ve rolled out updates for 5 key areas that are top of mind for IT organizations:

Simplicity. You’re telling us that there’s a constant need to simplify your overall IT environment and reduce the hours spent on routine activities, to free up time for more strategic projects. To make it even easier for you to manage your ONTAP environment, we’ve added enhancements for System Manager:

• You can quickly generate Ansible playbooks for doing common workflows, such as creating volumes and LUNs. NetApp’s portfolio of easy-to-use, certified Ansible modules can help you automate and simplify all, or nearly all, of your repetitive day-to-day tasks and get time to completion that’s over 50x faster.

• The number of alerts has been streamlined: You’re notified about only the most important items that need action.

• There’s even tighter integration for System Manager to support more configurations of ONTAP features through its dashboard.

To learn more about all the other ways that NetApp can help lighten the load for your IT staff 365 days a year, check out Simplicity365. You’ll see tangible, time-saving benefits that cover installing, optimizing, and ‘cloudizing.’

Hybrid cloud. We also understand that you want to bring the simplicity and flexibility of cloud to your data center – and all the enterprise capabilities of your data center to the public cloud. ONTAP can help you with that.

For example, are you looking for an even easier way to back up your data across your hybrid cloud? In less than 2 minutes, you can set up NetApp Cloud Backup service to automatically back up ONTAP data and store it in public clouds (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud). We’ve now expanded Cloud Backup service to include NetApp StorageGRID object storage as a backup destination for your on-prem ONTAP data, creating a very cost-effective data protection solution.

Security. A priority for all organizations is protection from data breaches and ransomware attacks. Our portfolio of ONTAP security capabilities is now stronger.

New enhancements increase multilevel file security and granular file access control. This is important for SELinux users, such as governments, higher education, and research accounts. We’ve also added security updates for remote access management.

Data protection. Data is likely one of your organization’s most valuable assets. Two new capabilities add to the integrated data protection of your ONTAP environment:

• If you have many applications that are critical to your business and need continuous data availability for SAN and NAS workloads, you can deploy NetApp MetroCluster-over-IP configurations that are even larger – double the previous size, now up to 8 total nodes (4 nodes at two separate locations).

• If you use large data containers for your NAS workloads, ONTAP now provides additional replication options to support the backup/disaster recovery requirements for your data.

Performance. We also hear that some of your applications need faster and faster performance. We continue to engineer even more SAN performance into our all-flash solutions.

For example, if you have applications that use single LUNs, such as VMware datastores, they can now gain up to 4x the performance compared to running on previous ONTAP releases.

More about ONTAP
Whether you consider each of these ONTAP enhancements as an appetizer, main course, or dessert, they’re all available on the expanded ONTAP menu. Which ones best satisfy your appetite for solving your most pressing IT challenges?

More information, and to learn more about lightening your IT staff’s load all year, read this blog on Simplicity365.