SnapCenter 4.2 Simplifies Your Journey to Modern Data Protection

We’ve received lots of customer feedback about asking us to make it easier for IT generalists or administrators to manage application-driven workload protection in SnapCenter. In response, we’ve simplified some of the processes in NetApp^® SnapCenter^® 4.2 and reduced the number of screens you need to navigate through.

If you’re deploying SnapCenter software for the first time, you simply click through single page and then edit a single configuration page to kick off the installation process. In earlier versions, you had to navigate through eight windows to start the installation. The new process does not remove any features, but the product team identified some of the redundant choices and converted those options to default settings for installation.

You can now initiate installation using this single page:

We’ve also simplified and improved the overall experience of adding a host. All you need to do is provide the host name and select the plug-ins, and SnapCenter installs the agents on the target host and discovers the application resources. You no longer have to navigate through five screens to finish the task.

Similarly, adding storage virtual machines (SVMs) is just about providing the SVM IP address or name with credentials. You don’t need to select more options on the Add SVM page unless you are changing the storage type to NetApp ONTAP^® Select or NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP.

Further simplifying the SVM process, SnapCenter now accepts cluster-management LIFs, and it automatically discovers SVMs; you don’t need to add them individually.

We have also enhanced the user access permissions page. Instead of grouping users under assets (policy, hosts, storage connection, and so on), you now group assets under users. This change simplifies the process to grant and revoke specific permission from a user.

SnapCenter 4.2 also has a new, improved dashboard, which provides backup information at a glance. To learn more, see Get a Better View of Backups with the Improved SnapCenter 4.2 Dashboard.

Simplification is part of our modernization strategy to minimize the effort to protect, restore, or clone resources. Quality, scalability, and enhancement are part of the roadmap, but the simplification journey will be continued in future releases to improve the user experience. So, get started and download SnapCenter 4.2.