NetApp Cloud Volumes Service: What To Know About File Services in the Cloud
Spencer Sells
You have applications requiring file services that you’re ready to migrate to the public cloud. That’s great.
But now you face an untenable choice: Either rearchitect your applications to use different protocols—which dramatically slows your migration to cloud—or run multiple virtual machines simply to provide file services, which fails to deliver the cloud service or capabilities you need.
NetApp Cloud Volumes Service offers a different alternative. To understand if it’s right for your enterprise, we’ve put together this handy reference guide.
Let’s start with a basic description of NetApp Cloud Volumes Service.
NetApp Cloud Volumes Service is a fully managed cloud-native file storage service. Based on NetApp’s proven ONTAP data management technology, it delivers all the advantages of NetApp’s vast file services expertise along with the simplicity and flexibility of the public cloud—so you can move to the cloud of your choice without leaving enterprise-grade file services behind.NetApp Cloud Volumes Service is available in three flavors, aligned with each of the three major public cloud infrastructure providers: Cloud Volumes Service for AWS, Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud, and Azure NetApp Files.
Some use cases cry out for NetApp Cloud Volumes Service.
Here are some of the leading use cases for NetApp Cloud Volumes Service:- File services: Get consistent high-performance NFS and SMB file shares for a wide range of workloads, such as web and rich-media content, user directories, oil and gas applications, electronic design automation (EDA), and media and entertainment. NetApp’s market-leading data protection capabilities—including our proven Snapshot and fast copy—work in the public cloud just like they do on premises. Instead of standing up your own expensive NFS or SMB servers with the highest levels of cloud block storage, you get fast file-storage performance as a service, with NetApp as your admin.
- Databases: Migrate your existing databases to any of the leading public cloud infrastructures—without rearchitecting or losing productivity, and with greatly reduced risk—then run your mission-critical database applications with the same enterprise-grade performance, resiliency, and availability as in your on-premises environment. Accelerate database development through rapid cloning of production data for cost-effective test and development.
- Agile DevOps: Leverage fast, persistent volumes for software development. Expedite development by building out workspaces in seconds rather than hours, and rapidly compile and build high-performance storage for CI/CD pipelines.
- Data Analytics: Create data lakes fast; use public cloud elastic compute for analytical processing; and perform get/put operations without racking up charges associated with object store services. Because you can clone massive datasets in seconds with NetApp Cloud Volumes Service, every data scientist can have their own copy.
It makes life easier for your entire technical team.
If you’re moving workloads to public cloud and want to consume storage capacity without having to administer it, the fully managed NetApp Cloud Volumes Service is for you. It’s ideal for anyone who wants to consume capacity, not administer it. That includes developers, line-of-business engineers, database admins, application architects, IT and cloud architects, and those who run NFS or SMB workloads and applications such as SQL, Oracle, or SAP that use file services for data storage.IT leaders can leverage both their NetApp file services expertise and premier cloud data services, while cloud architects and development teams can provision, automate, and scale everything in NetApp Cloud Volumes Service using REST APIs.
NetApp Cloud Volumes Service offers important benefits.
- No need to rewrite apps. Run any workload, even legacy applications, in public clouds.
- You get NAS volumes over NFS and SMB with all-flash performance.
- Because it’s fully managed, it handles configuring, managing, and orchestrating file services in your public cloud environment so you don’t have to.
- Improve application resilience by creating instant, efficient snapshots to protect your data without sacrificing performance.
- Accelerate projects, time to insight, and software development through fast copies of data that can be handed out to developers, data scientists, and QA engineers.
- Synchronize data to and from multiple data sources for consolidation and cross-business use. Structure data enrichment and enterprise data protection, which includes encrypting all data at rest by default.
- Easily and quickly import data to and from on-premises and other storage repositories via NetApp Cloud Sync.
- Maintain business continuity with a space-efficient backup service that creates backup copies in the object store.
- Run file shares at peak performance—each Cloud Volume can scale up to 100TB capacity and supports up to 50 million nodes (files and directories), and can provide up to 128 MB/sec throughput per TB—while maintaining enterprise-level data protection and security.
Metrics confirm performance.
Benchmarks for file services, Oracle, Hadoop Spark, MySQL, and HPC workloads validate that NetApp Cloud Volumes Service for public cloud performs and scales as advertised.It supports the right protocols.
NetApp Cloud Volumes Service for public clouds supports NFSv3 for Linux and UNIX clients, as well as SMB3 for Windows clients operating in the cloud. NetApp Cloud Volumes Service also provides multi-protocol access.NetApp Cloud Volumes Service is easy to buy.
Cloud Volumes Service for AWS Purchase NetApp Cloud Volumes Service for AWS directly through the AWS Marketplace. You’ll receive a single bill from AWS that includes charges for this service. The service is available in AWS US-East-1, US-West-1, US-West-2, EU-West-1, EU-West-2, EU-Central-1, AP-Northeast-1 and AP-Southeast-2, with plans to add more regions over time.Azure NetApp Files Purchase Azure NetApp Files directly from Azure. The service is available in Azure US-West-2, US-East, US-SouthCentral, EU-West, and EU-North, and coming soon to US-Central and Australia-East.
Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud Purchase NetApp Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud directly from Google. You’ll receive a monthly invoice from Google Cloud, so no need to manage bills from multiple vendors. The service is available in Google Cloud US-East-4 and US-Central-1, and coming soon to US-West-2 and Europe-West-3.
Get more information.
To find out more about NetApp Cloud Volumes Service, go to NetApp Cloud Central and check out the Products pages or use the pop-up chat function to ask questions.
Spencer Sells
Spencer leads the Cloud Services Solution Planning team in the Cloud Data Services Business Unit focused on enabling customers to run workloads in public clouds. The team consists of product managers and solution architects that work on Cloud Volumes Service and Azure NetApp Files. Prior to this role, Spencer spent eight years at NetApp leading the product and solution management team responsible for providing the best storage for virtual server, virtual desktop, and cloud environments. Spencer has worked in enterprise storage industry for over twenty years. Prior to joining NetApp Spencer held various product management and product marketing positions for Brocade Communications, as well as product management, marketing and operations positions at Gadzoox Networks and Amdahl. Spencer holds a bachelor’s degree in International Relations from Stanford University, and a Master of Arts in International Economics and Japan Studies from Johns Hopkins.
