NetApp ONTAP 9.5 Features

NetApp ONTAP 9.5:

• Delivers unmatched versatility that offers high performance and consistent low latency, accelerating critical workloads with industry-leading end-to-end NVMe capabilities.
• Unifies data management across storage environments — flash, disk, and cloud.
• Automates tiering of petabyte-scale datasets to object stores in the cloud or on the premises.
• Reduces deployment costs for multisite business continuity solutions.
• Accelerates read performance with cached data sets within a cluster and at remote sites.
• Increases storage efficiency savings by up to 15% for relational database applications.
• Radically increases performance by auto-tiering data between AFF systems and NetApp MAX Data on servers.

Cloud-Tiers:

FlexCache

Those of you familiar with NetApp 7-Mode will know FlexCache as a cache appliance that sat in front of ONTAP clusters. FlexCache in ONTAP 9.5 is a native capability within clusters that are sparsely-populated cache volumes, which upon reads, only ‘hot’ blocks are cached, this goes for both user data and metadata.

NVMe Over Fibre Channel (NVMe/FC) Update

ONTAP 9.5 introduces multi-path (storage path) fail-over with Asynchronous Namespace Access (ANA). ANA is a capability that NetApp has driven the development of, and getting it accepted as an industry standard. Similar to ALUA for FCP, ANA provides storage fail-over capabilities for SUSE Enterprise Linux 15 in this initial release; there is also support for RedHat Enterprise Linux 7.6 but without ANA.

SVM-DR Relationship using System Manager

FlexGroup Enhancements

Improving on the capabilities of ONTAP 9.4, which introduced quotas for FlexGroup, ONTAP 9.5 introduces capacity support for those quotas, so users can no longer over-run their assigned capacity, as well as preventing qtrees from utilizing FlexGroup vol capacity.

NetApp Data Availability Services (NDAS)

NDAS is a simple cloud based orchestration engine for data protection using powerful Google-like search and restore capabilities. NDAS simplifies data protection and extends data availability across the hybrid cloud by keeping active data copies in the cloud, whilst preserving snapshots and file metadata.

SnapMirror Synchronous (SM-S)

Finally SnapMirror Synchronous comes to ONTAP. This is a feature that customers have been asking for for quite a while to help them meet regulatory and industry mandatory requirements.

 

Logical Space Accounting

ONTAP 9.4 introduced a way to report storage efficiency savings to storage administrators, but to mask those savings to users. For example, if a user is writing to a 10TB volume and 6TB of data has been written to the volume, but storage efficiencies have saved 2TB, then ONTAP can report the actual 6TB of capacity back to users, rather than the 4TB used by way of space savings. This provides storage administrators a way to charge back properly to end users and helps prevent overruns of storage capacity.

MAX Data

MAX Data offers ultra-low latency (think sub 10 microsecond) and more Ops/second with server-side software-based memory acceleration that leverages persistent memory such as NVDIMM and Optane Memory as they become available. Based on the Plexistor technology that NetApp acquired last year, MAX Data also offers enterprise-class data resiliency with MAX Recovery technology, for high availability and faster data recovery.

MAX Data can help accelerate database applications like Oracle, Cassandra, MongoDB and a variety of other Linux-based applications.