Google Cloud NetApp Volumes enhances performance, security, and cost-efficiency

With its latest enhancements, Google Cloud NetApp Volumes provides enterprises like yours with improved data protection capabilities and consistent performance across even more regions. These updates deliver broader coverage for your business applications, while reducing your costs through optimized resource management.

Controlling costs is crucial for any enterprise. Google Cloud NetApp Volumes offers intelligent features to help you manage your resources effectively. 

Empower your organization with the Google Cloud NetApp Volumes Flex service level, a modern solution born from the strategic collaboration between NetApp and Google Cloud. You get cloud scalability with easy-to-use, comprehensive data management, all at a competitive price point that’s tailored for businesses of any scale. 

Now generally available, the Flex service level offers independent scaling of throughput, IOPS, and capacity, enabling your organization to achieve peak performance without the inefficiencies of overprovisioning. Now you can adapt instantly to fluctuating demands by dynamically adjusting resources without affecting other system components. This feature supports consistent application performance and eliminates unnecessary costs. With this capability, the first tebibyte of storage can reduce your costs by more than 48% and deliver 4 times greater performance than before. It streamlines your proof-of-concept testing and offers flexibility in scaling from small deployments to enterprise-wide solutions. 

If your enterprise manages massive datasets, intelligently optimizing your storage costs is critical. By using the NetApp Volumes auto-tiering feature, now in preview, you can realize significant savings along with enhanced storage efficiency—without any impact on your storage system or changes to your application.

Auto-tiering automatically and seamlessly migrates your infrequently accessed data to lower-cost storage tiers without affecting the file system or requiring application changes, dramatically reducing your overall storage expenditures. With this intelligent automation, high-performance storage is reserved for your critical, active workloads to maintain optimal application performance. By eliminating the need for manual data lifecycle management and strategically aligning storage tiers with data access patterns, auto-tiering delivers a compelling, cost-effective, and high-performing data management solution for your enterprise. You can reclaim your budget, optimize resources, and future-proof your storage infrastructure. 

Data protection is a vital aspect of enterprise data management. By securing sensitive data, you maintain system integrity, reduce risks, and build trust, driving business growth for your organization. The NetApp Volumes latest updates are designed to provide continuous security and protection of your data, including external replication for business continuity, reliable data migration, and enhanced backup capabilities for compliance and ransomware protection. 

External replication that’s powered by the NetApp^® SnapMirror^® feature, now in preview, offers your organization industry-leading flexibility and control over your hybrid cloud data landscape. You get effortless synchronization of data changes that originate from either on-premises or cloud environments, such as NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP^® storage to Google Cloud and vice versa, enabling compelling use cases like: 

• Streamlined disaster recovery with availability of up-to-date replicas in the cloud or on premises.  
• Accelerated and simplified workload migration between environments, with minimal downtime and no data loss. Application and data migrations take less time and are less complex than with other solutions. 
• Enablement of hybrid cloud workflows, where data can be actively used in both locations. 
• Enhanced application integrity and business continuity by maintaining synchronized and consistent data across all your environments, eliminating data corruption and enabling access to current information regardless of location. 

Your organization can benefit from the configuration and management advantages of SnapMirror, now with enhanced functionality for two-way replication between Google Cloud and on-premises data centers. You can use NetApp’s established data management effectiveness and uniformity throughout your hybrid infrastructure, maintaining data coherence and accessibility while capitalizing on the scalability and agility of Google Cloud. 

Now generally available, cross-region backup enables seamless backup of your critical data volumes to a designated secondary region, providing a crucial safety net against unforeseen regional disruptions, outages, and catastrophic events. It also offers options for cross-region data protection with different recovery point objectives (RPOs), recovery time objectives (RTOs), and pricing. 

By maintaining a crash-consistent and updated copy of your data in a geographically separate location, you can minimize potential downtime and rapidly recover your essential services and applications. This capability is integral to a comprehensive data-resilience strategy, offering peace of mind and bolstering your organization’s ability to maintain operational continuity in the face of adversity.  

Google Cloud NetApp Volumes also offers immutable backups, now generally available, to protect your data from accidental or malicious changes. These unmodifiable and undeletable backups help you preserve data integrity, meet compliance, safeguard against data corruption and cyberattacks, and maintain business continuity. Your organization can meet regulatory requirements and secure long-term data availability. 

Single-file-level restore, now available in preview with Google Cloud NetApp Volumes, offers precise and controlled recovery of your individual files and folders, leading to significantly lower RPOs and RTOs. This capability enhances your data protection by enabling rapid retrieval of accidentally deleted or corrupted files, which eliminates the need to restore entire volumes and minimizes business disruption. The targeted approach gives you greater control over the recovery process and significantly speeds up restores, resulting in a more efficient and cost-effective data infrastructure. 

With Assured Workloads regions support, now available with all service levels, Google Cloud NetApp Volumes provides stringent security and comprehensive global compliance controls for regional data residency and access restrictions for critical data storage. You get benefits such as simplified enforcement measures, enhanced security through advanced encryption, access controls, and integrated security services that minimize the risk of breaches and unauthorized access. In addition, it maintains data residency and reduces risk with its resilient infrastructure with built-in disaster recovery capabilities. It also streamlines the management of your regulated workloads through intuitive interfaces, automation tools, and seamless integration with other Google Cloud services. 

Start expanding and enhancing your data storage performance, security, and cost-efficiency. Review the release notes about the enhancements to Google Cloud NetApp Volumes that can deliver tangible benefits for your enterprise.  

This blog was coauthored with Rukmani Gopalan, group product manager of Google Cloud NetApp Volumes at Google Cloud.