Remote Infrastructure Management: ONTAP 9.5 FlexCache

What is FlexCache:

FlexCache is a remote caching capability that simplifies file distribution, reduces WAN latency, and lowers WAN bandwidth costs. It enables distributed product development across multiple sites, as well as branch office access to corporate datasets.

NetApp FlexCache

With NetApp FlexCache technology, a feature of ONTAP 9 software, cache only the actively-read data, rather than entire files or volumes, either locally within a datacenter or geographically dispersed at remote sites.

Improve the speed and productivity of collaboration across multiple locations:

· For content generation workflows such as software development, corporate marketing, and animation

Increase data throughput:

· For read-intensive applications such as movie rendering, chip-design, seismic analysis, and financial simulation

By serving Hot Data, data that needs to be accessed frequently, from multiple controllers in a cluster you can increase the performance delivered to key applications. And by caching Hot Data local to users at multiple locations around the world, you can enhance their collaboration by enabling simultaneous access to centralized datasets while also reducing the response time they receive when accessing the Hot Data.

Benefits of FlexCache

Deploying NetApp FlexCache software allows users to scale out storage performance for read-heavy workloads. But there are several other benefits:

· Speed data access for remote users by reducing remote access latency
· Increase performance economically with minimal incremental storage by caching only accessed data, not entire volumes.
· Improve storage system ROI by consolidating more workloads and lowering WAN bandwidth costs
· Increase flexibility to handle workload spikes by enabling cache instances to be created on demand, without additional storage investment

FlexCache is supported on AFF, FAS, and ONTAP Select systems running ONTAP 9.5 or later versions.

In this initial release:

FlexCache is only supported in NFSv3.
Licenses are not included in the premium bundle and are a per-cluster add-on (based on total cluster cache capacity). Subscription terms are 1 or 3 years.
Both origin and FlexCache volumes can be provisioned on AFF, FAS, or ONTAP Select, but not all combinations make sense, so think carefully about where to deploy them.
Both Intra-cluster origin and FlexCache volumes can be in the same SVM or in different SVMs, giving you some flexibility in deployment.
You can only provision 10 FlexCache volumes per origin FlexVol volume, and up to 10 FlexCache volumes per node.
FlexCache volumes are FlexGroup volumes by default, and origin volumes must be FlexVol volumes (FlexGroup volumes are not supported, neither are Qtrees and quotas on origin volumes).

Create a new flexcache volume using volume flexcache command.