NetApp has announced its NetApp ONTAP 9 operating system, a “major advance in enterprise data management software that combines new levels of simplicity and flexibility with powerful capabilities and efficiencies.” With ONTAP 9 software, enterprises would be able to quickly integrate the best of traditional and emerging technologies, incorporating flash, cloud infrastructure and software-defined architectures to build a Data Fabric foundation across on-premises and cloud resources.
ONTAP 9 software is optimized for flash with improved performance and capacity utilization. “As effective flash dollar-per-GB costs drop, flash deployment in the enterprise is accelerating,” said Eric Burgener, research director for IDC’s storage practice. “NetApp’s release of the industry’s first 15TB flash drive, combined with new storage efficiency technology features in ONTAP 9, continues to drive that cost down in a flash-optimized, enterprise-class storage platform that is well suited for the type of dense mixed workload consolidation that customers are increasingly looking to their trusted suppliers to deliver.”
Users of ONTAP 9 software have three options to meet their needs. ONTAP 9 is targeted for general on-premises enterprise use, ONTAP Cloud (formerly NetApp Cloud ONTAP) delivers enterprise-grade data management in the cloud. The new ONTAP Select offers a software-only data management solution.
NetApp ONTAP 9 benefits would include:
- Simplicity – “Easy to set-up and manage,” ONTAP 9 can be deployed and serving data for critical workloads “in as few as 10 minutes.” Also, with enhanced system monitoring, enterprises can use it to centrally manage performance, capacity and data protection across their IT environment.
- Flexibility – The ONTAP 9 software would be an ideal platform for workload consolidation. The platform offers common data services across general purpose server hardware deployments as software defined storage (SDS) in addition to NetApp engineered systems, converged infrastructure, third-party arrays, next-to-the-cloud systems, and the cloud.
- Security – Customers would be able to achieve up to 100 times greater security against drive failures and meet stringent data retention policies with new triple-parity RAID protection and expanded storage encryption and compliance features.
“Customers struggling to add flash and cloud capabilities see ONTAP 9 as a powerful consolidation stress reliever that can be deployed with fewer skilled IT resources,” said Lee Caswell, vice president, Product, Solutions and Services Marketing, NetApp. “ONTAP 9 delivers real economic value that reduces the cost of flash, introduces a cost-effective software consumption model, and standardizes data management across disk, flash and cloud resources. With NetApp ONTAP 9, we are helping customers and partners convert our feature innovations to business value.”
