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Why NetApp ONTAP for enterprise data management

NetApp® ONTAP® data management software helps you quickly respond to new business challenges, simplify your day-to-day activities, and impress your team. Whatever your data management needs—on your premises and in the cloud—ONTAP has you covered.

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Supporting today’s data-driven enterprise

Businesses today are under pressure to quickly respond to new challenges and opportunities. In order to support the organization, IT departments must simultaneously deliver on three key priorities: 1) reliably support today’s business critical applications, 2) anticipate and prepare for a broad range of future requirements as data grows and their cloud strategy evolves, and 3) seamlessly move, manage, and protect data wherever it lives across their hybrid cloud.

And, typically, they must do it all without additional IT budget.

ONTAP: Your foundation for a seamless hybrid cloud

Nothing else in the industry helps you create a rock-solid foundation for your hybrid cloud storage environment like NetApp® ONTAP® enterprise data management software. Our latest version of ONTAP combines new levels of simplicity, flexibility, and security to deliver powerful data management capabilities, proven storage efficiencies, and leading cloud integration, so you can seamlessly manage all the data moving throughout your enterprise.

ONTAP allows you to flexibly deploy storage on your choice of architectures—hardware storage systems, software-defined storage (SDS), and the cloud—while unifying enterprise data management across all of them. Accelerate your enterprise applications with flash, without compromising on the essential data services that you need. And seamlessly manage your data as it flows to wherever you need it most to help you make the best possible decisions for your organization.

ONTAP makes it easy to create an environment that is smart, powerful, and trusted that spans flash, disk, and cloud and is ready to handle your future requirements.

Smart: Simplify operations and reduce costs

Streamline data management

Whether you’re adding new workloads or managing your existing environment, it’s important to simplify your processes to maximize the productivity and responsiveness of your staff. ONTAP gives you a common set of features across deployment architectures, which simplifies operations so that your IT team can focus on strategic business priorities. Unify data management across a hybrid cloud that can span flash, disk, and cloud running SAN, NAS, and object workloads. Easily move your data within or between storage clusters, or to the cloud—wherever it is most useful. ONTAP is the foundation for a data fabric that gives you flexibility, choice, and control across your storage environment.

Deploy workloads in less than 10 minutes

Built-in application workflows enable you to quickly and confidently provision storage for key workloads in less than 10 minutes—from power-on to serving data. These workloads include Oracle, SAP, SQL Server, and virtual desktops and servers. Years of NetApp experience and best practices are integrated into the System Manager wizard and factory configurations, enabling you to quickly set up your new configuration just by answering a few questions.

Get proven storage efficiency

With ONTAP, you get a comprehensive, industry-leading portfolio of storage efficiency capabilities. Inline data compression, deduplication, and compaction work together to reduce your storage costs and maximize the data you can store. Plus, you can multiply your savings with space-efficient NetApp® SnapshotTM copies, thin provisioning, replication, and cloning technologies.

Tier automatically to cloud

Deliver high performance to your applications and reduce storage costs by automatically tiering cold data from the performance tier to a private or public cloud. FabricPool frees up space on your existing NetApp® AFF all-flash systems or NetApp® FAS infrastructure, so you can consolidate more workloads. For new all-flash purchases, FabricPool enables you to buy a smaller initial AFF configuration.

Maximize investment protection

ONTAP gives you the flexibility to create an integrated, scalable storage environment by clustering storage controllers from different families—AFF and FAS systems—and from different generations. You can grow your system with the latest hardware, continue to use your older hardware, and connect all of it to the cloud. When it’s time to retire a storage system, you can simply upgrade the controllers and keep data in place on the existing disk shelves.

Get simple, powerful management capabilities

NetApp enterprise data management software is designed to manage hybrid clouds. You can centrally monitor the health of your environment by viewing metrics on capacity utilization, performance, availability, and data protection. It can also help automate your storage processes and integrate them into your data center orchestration platform for end-to-end service delivery for your private and hybrid cloud services.

In addition, NetApp® Active IQ® is a digital advisor that uses AIOps to simplify and automate the proactive care and optimization of your NetApp environment. Continuous risk assessments, predictive alerts, prescriptive guidance, and automated actions help prevent problems before they occur, leading to improved system health, higher system availability and improved security.

Powerful: Respond to changing business requirements

To support your critical applications, you need a storage environment that delivers high performance and availability. But you also need the versatility to scale and adapt as your business changes. ONTAP delivers on all these requirements with flash performance for scalable, nondisruptive operations.

Get flash optimization

ONTAP delivers the high throughput and low latency that enterprise applications require, while providing comprehensive data services. ONTAP is optimized for flash, including AFF systems with NVMe solid-state drives (SSDs) and NVMe over Fabrics. AFF running the most recent versions of ONTAP provide up to twice the throughput of the same workloads compared to running on prior ONTAP releases, while still delivering consistent submillisecond latency.

ONTAP running on NetApp FAS systems improves the performance of HDD storage by automatically caching hot read data in flash. This provides a balance between performance, capacity, and cost that is appropriate for many workloads.

Deliver consistent performance

To maintain high customer satisfaction, adaptive quality of service (QoS) helps you deliver consistent performance by automatically adjusting storage resource levels to respond to changes in workloads (number of terabytes of data, priority of the workload, and so on). Adaptive QoS simplifies the implementation of policies to keep your workloads within prescribed minimum and maximum throughput targets.

Stay ahead of business changes with seamless scalability

You can start small and grow with your business by using high-capacity SSDs or HDDs to scale your storage environment. Storage systems that run ONTAP can handle SAN, NAS, and object workloads that range from a few terabytes up to 176PB. You can scale by adding capacity to existing storage controllers or scale out by adding controllers to seamlessly expand your cluster up to 24 nodes.

ONTAP also supports massive NAS data containers that are easy to manage. With NetApp ONTAP FlexGroup, a single namespace can grow to 20PB or 400 billion files while delivering consistent high performance and resiliency.

Future-proof your data infrastructure

ONTAP lets you design and deploy your storage environment across the widest range of architectures, so you can match the approach that’s right for your evolving business needs:


You can move your data seamlessly between architectures to place it in the optimal environment for performance, capacity, and cost efficiency.

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Using NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP from AWS Marketplace, we have achieved recovery times in testing that are almost instantaneous, and with as little as 10 minutes of data loss.

Peter Raettig, Head of Technical Operations, Reach plc

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We now have a tiered solution at the right size for our environment at a total cost of ownership that was affordable.

Jay Efferson, Information Sciences Project Manager, City of Baton Rouge

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The branch and online world are growing ever closer together. With NetApp, we can use on-premises and cloud services as needed to support business projects quickly and efficiently.

Bernd Jürgens, Unit Lead IT Operations, C&A Services

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Trusted: Protect and secure data across your hybrid cloud

Integrated data protection and nondisruptive operations

ONTAP provides NetApp integrated data protection (IDP) to safeguard your operations and keep them running smoothly.

Meet your requirements for local backup with nearly instantaneous recovery by using space-efficient Snapshot copies. Achieve remote backup/recovery and disaster recovery with NetApp® SnapMirror® asynchronous replication or with SnapMirror Cloud when replicating data to a cloud object store in a public or private cloud. Or, to step up to zero data loss protection (RPO=0), leverage SnapMirror Synchronous replication.

For your critical applications that require continuous data availability, NetApp® MetroClusterTM and SnapMirror Business Continuity technologies synchronously mirror between locations. The storage arrays can be deployed at a single site, across a metropolitan area, or in different cities. MetroCluster is robust, array-based infrastructure for your SAN and NAS workloads. SnapMirror Business Continuity enables flexibility to consolidate multiple workloads and then granularly choose the most critical SAN applications to support with continuous availability if a data center disaster occurs.

With ONTAP, you can service and update your infrastructure during regular work hours without disrupting your business. Dynamically assign, promote, and retire storage resources without downtime over the lifecycle of an application. Data can be moved between controllers without application interruption, so you can get the data on the node that delivers the optimal combination of speed, latency, capacity, and cost.

Robust security

The leading portfolio of security capabilities in ONTAP helps you integrate data security across your hybrid cloud to avoid unauthorized data access and ransomware attacks. With the NetApp Volume Encryption feature that is built in to ONTAP, you can easily and efficiently protect your at-rest data by encrypting any volume on an AFF or FAS system. No special encrypting disks are required. In-flight encryption for backup and replication protects your data in transit. Plus, other features such as multifactor authentication, role-based access control (RBAC), and onboard and external key management increase the security of your data.

Secure consolidation

You can save time and money by sharing the same consolidated infrastructure for workloads or tenants that have different performance, capacity, and security requirements. And with ONTAP, you don’t have to worry that the activity in one tenant partition will affect another. With multitenancy, a storage cluster can be subdivided into secure partitions that are governed by rights and permissions.

Rigorous compliance

To meet your stringent compliance and data retention policies, NetApp® SnapLock® software enables write once, read many (WORM) protected data for your ONTAP environment. NetApp also provides superior integration with enterprise backup vendors and leading applications. In addition, cryptographic shredding by the NetApp secure purge technology enables you to remediate data spillage online while the system is still in use. It also provides state-of-the-art “right-to-erasure” capability for General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Cloud Volumes ONTAP

NetApp® Cloud Volumes ONTAP®, our cloud-based service available on AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, helps you optimize your cloud storage costs and increase application performance while enhancing data protection, security, and compliance.
  • See Cloud Volumes ONTAP
ONTAP Select

NetApp ONTAP Select offers robust enterprise storage services that are easily deployed on your choice of commodity hardware from the comfort of your own data center. It combines the best of the cloud with the flexibility, resilience, and locality of on-premises storage.
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Powered by NVIDIA and NetApp, NetApp® AIPod® helps you fully realize the promise of AI and deep learning (DL). Streamline the flow of data reliably and speed up analytics, training, and inference with your data fabric that spans from edge to core to cloud.
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Make your move to ONTAP

When it comes to creating a smart, powerful, and trusted storage infrastructure that reduces costs, accelerates critical workloads, and protects and secures data across your hybrid cloud, look no further than ONTAP. You’ll quickly discover why it continues to be the world’s leading enterprise data management software.

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