 "NetApp Unveils New Version Of Clustered Data ONTAP")
NetApp has announced a new version of its flagship storage operating system – clustered Data ONTAP. The new software gives organisations and cloud service providers the capability to rapidly and cost effectively deliver new services and capacity with maximum application uptime. Clustered Data ONTAP 8.2 cuts through the performance, availability, and efficiency limits of traditional hardware silos, empowering IT to non-disruptively align the storage infrastructure with changing business and application demands.
Its capabilities include non-disruptive operations with greater than five-nines reliability (99.999%), providing continuous data access during scheduled downtime and dynamic load balancing without disruptive data migrations. It offers seamless scalability with up to 69PB of storage and 24 controller nodes, 49,000 LUNs, 12,000 NAS volumes supporting over 100,000 clients and single container up to 20 PB and proven storage and operational efficiency within a unified and multi-tenant architecture meet the needs of enterprises, small, and midsized businesses.
Software-defined storage (SDS) is one component of the emerging software-defined data center (SDDC) model, which focuses on agility in delivering IT services to application owners while improving operational and IT resource efficiency. Akin to virtual machines and server virtualisation, clustered Data ONTAP abstracts physical storage into a set of Storage Virtual Machines (SVM; formerly known as vServer). This allows NetApp to deliver native multi-tenant, policy-based storage services via programmable APIs and application integrations. Clustered Data ONTAP is the first storage and data management solution that makes the promise of SDS attainable today.
“CIOs are moving from builders of applications and operators of datacentres to brokers of information services to the business,” said Jay Kidd, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, NetApp. “This new role requires technologies that can speed IT response time and drive operational and resource efficiency. Clustered Data ONTAP fills this need today, providing the key building block that delivers the benefits of software-defined storage models and will replace existing slow and inefficient siloed approaches. Our new software gives IT unsurpassed agility, including the flexibility to deploy across multiple platforms.”
As part of this announcement, NetApp also announced the general availability of Flash Cache 2 controller-attached PCIe intelligent caching modules, which increase flash module capacity by 100 percent to 2TB, compared to previous generations. The new flash technology, based on NetApp’s patented and patent-pending flash expertise, boosts performance for workloads that are random read intensive, such as file services, messaging, OLTP databases, and server and desktop virtualisation.