ONTAP 9.7: Do More – with Less Time and Effort

It’s late-October, which means it’s almost Halloween. It’s also time for NetApp® Insight, our customer conference in Las Vegas – as well as another update to our NetApp ONTAP® ecosystem. We know you need to efficiently and securely manage your company’s data across your hybrid cloud, so every six months we roll out a new release of our ONTAP data management software to help you with your key challenges. You’ve told us you are wrestling with issues such as cloud integration, security, business continuity, and simplifying storage administration. This latest ONTAP release – ONTAP 9.7 – has many enhancements to let you do more with less time and effort. 

Which of these are your primary challenges?  

Simplifying operations: 

• Do you have a lean staff that is primarily IT generalists? The most significant update in this ONTAP release is how simple we’ve made it to manage your ONTAP environment. The new management UI for ONTAP System Manager will save you time by showing key system information about capacity, hardware health, networking, and performance history with up to one year of data. Only one screen is needed for provisioning LUNs or NAS volumes. You don’t have to be a storage expert to configure and manage your ONTAP system. If you have a larger environment with multiple clusters, Active IQ Unified Manager will boost your admin productivity. Manage petabytes of data from a single dashboard and receive notifications to proactively and quickly address storage risks so they don’t become problems. New capabilities in Unified Manager provide insights on security risks and compliance

Building your hybrid cloud:  

• A great way to get the best value from your all-flash system is to tier cold data to the cloud, leaving more capacity available for hot data that needs ultra-low latency. Since the FabricPool feature of ONTAP was released over two years ago, it’s enabled our customers to tier over 100 PB to the major public clouds – Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, and IBM – as well as to on-prem private clouds built with NetApp StorageGRID systems. New in this ONTAP release is the ability to simultaneously mirror your tiered data out to multiple clouds. This gives you the flexibility to store your data at multiple cloud providers for added resiliency, and it simplifies the process for changing cloud providers (and do that nondisruptively). 

Securing your data:  

• ONTAP has a strong portfolio of security capabilities that protect you from ransomware attacks, data theft, and unauthorized system access. New with ONTAP 9.7, we’ve made it simpler to protect your data by automatically enabling data at-rest encryption for new volumes when an encryption key manager is configured on the cluster. 

Delivering business continuity:  

• For your enterprise applications that need non-stop data access, we continue to reduce the cost and deployment time for continuously available environments. You can now use your existing network infrastructure for synchronous mirroring with MetroCluster. Your switches will need to comply with NetApp specs for bandwidth, latency and option settings, since we want to be sure you’ll get the level of business continuity that you’re expecting.  

Protecting your data in NVMe environments:  

• If you’re using NVMe over Fabric to further improve the performance of your enterprise business applications – or are planning to use it soon – it’s also important to protect this critical data to the level your business requires. Now you can get zero data loss protection (RPO=0) for your NVMe environment using SnapMirror Synchronous replication.