ONTAP 910.1 ONTAP 910.1 ONTAP 910.1 introduces consistency groups to help you manage the protection of your data. Consistency groups provide an easy way to plan and manage data in an application workload. In effect, you can easily select volumes that are related to a particular workload, ensuring the snapshot collection happens in a coordinated manner, as well as the protection of all application objects with local or remote protection. Consistency groups create simultaneous consistent backups of a collection of volumes at a point in time organized to safeguard your data with right order consistency guarantees. Consistency groups or CGs create an easy way to group loans and volumes, set protection policies, and to ensure that your application workload can easily be recovered. Consistency groups can now exist in nested or standalone relationships. A single consistency group can be associated with up to 80 volumes. Flexvolve volumes, LUNs, or other consistency groups. Those volumes may contain LUNS, NVMe name spaces or NFS, SMB content. The parent consistency group can be associated with up to five child CG relationships. Consistency groups allow you to organize distinct groups of volumes and set appropriate snapshot policies for each group. For example, you might want to create a parent consistency group to represent all the storage objects related to a database application with a pair of child consistency groups under it where the child CGs are associated with the data volumes and the log volumes of that application respectively. Each consistency group can have its own policy. For example, back up the data consistency group daily while the logs are backed up hourly, thus reducing RPO. The parent consistency group representing the entire application can have its own snapshot policy too. System manager makes it easy to create new consistency groups. When creating a new CG, you can provision all new LUNs and volumes or use existing volumes. When creating your consistency groups, think about the requirements of your application. It is recommended to combine volumes that have related functionality or similar performance and management requirements. For example, application data in one consistency group and application logs in another. To create a CG with new LUNs, we go to the consistency group menu in system manager, then select the add button, which has two options. In this instance, select using new LUNs. This workflow requires you to name your consistency group and to designate the capacity per LN. You can also set the protection policy for your CG at this stage or wait to do it later. By default, consistency groups do not have a protection policy set. If you are creating a consistency group with new LUNs, you can only add LUNs. However, CGS also allow you to work with existing volumes regardless of their content such as LUNs, NVMe namespaces or files and directories provided that they have not already been added to a consistency group. If you have existing LUNS or flex volumes you would like to add to a CG, those can be added as well. Once a volume is assigned to a consistency group, it cannot be removed from that consistency group. However, the volume can be deleted and will then no longer be associated with the consistency group. To delete a consistency group, you must first ensure there is no active SMBC relationship. If there is, it must be removed. Consistency groups will continue to exist after SMBC relationships are disassociated. Consistency groups can then be deleted from the main consistency menu in system manager.Consistency groups allow policies to be set at the local or remote levels. To set local snapshot policies, you can work with pre-existing snapshot policies or configure a custom one at the protection overview menu. Snapshot copies are readonly point in time images of a volume. Snapshot policies can be set while configuring the consistency group and can be modified at any time. Policies can be different between parent and child consistency groups if you are utilizing nested relationships. And these policies can further differ from individual volume protection policies. Snapshots with consistency groups can be scheduled or taken on demand meeting your backup needs. In the event of a crash, disaster, or other incident, it is easy to restore your data. If you have configured a protection policy, select the desired consistency group from the main CG menu. Follow the application procedure on the host for restoring from a backup. Then select the tab of the copy type you want to recover from, either snapshot or snap mirror, and then find the copy you want to recover from. Select the three dots next to the copy and then select restore. Your application volumes will be restored to the point in time copy of your data prior to the incident. Consistency groups easily integrate with ONAP to serve your data management needs. In a SAN environment, you can organize your data needs around consistency groups, creating new LONs and volumes with consistency groups. Existing volumes and data can also be easily added to a new consistency group in SAN NS and NVMe configurations. Volumes associated with a consistency group can be accessed and managed with system manager. The ONAP REST API and the ONAP CLI as you would with any volume. They can be a source of a volume granular snap mirror operation, asynchronous or synchronous, and may be moved, cloned, or resized as you would with any other volume. Easy to work with, consistency groups are one more way on helps you manage and backup your data with ease. NetApp's vision is to provide our customers with a simplified data management experience with dynamic, smart, and adaptive defaults to meet your application's requirements. At NetUp, we're proud to be specialists.