NetApp’s Investment in Simplifying the Complexity of Hybrid Multicloud
This week, I had the opportunity to attend NetApp INSIGHT 2019. I really enjoyed being at the event this week with numerous Evolving Solutions clients and team members. I cannot express the value of spending time with our clients, learning from them and being a part of their technology team.
NetApp continues to demonstrate their investment in simplifying the complexity of Hybrid Multicloud with their DataFabric and their Cloud Services (cloud.netapp.com).
This week, NetApp announced NetApp Keystone subscription services:
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZxrQyWnuYY
Website: https://www.netapp.com/us/solutions/keystone/index.aspx
The challenging part of Insight is there is not enough time to attend all of the sessions that I would like to. So, I focused on the level-3 and 2 sessions. One session that I was very excited about was Policy-Driven Data Management And Cloud Mobility with Rubrik and NetApp. Rubrik and NetApp announced their partnership and Rubrik expanded their existing offerings of using NetApp StorageGrid for on-prem object storage tiering (private cloud) to include the ability to efficiently back up NetApp NAS shares using NetApp’s SnapDiff technology. Without SnapDiff scanning a NAS share with 500M files to backup 1.5% changed data would take 7-14 hours. With SnapDiff the time was ~15mins. Not only is time saved, but there is also much less load on an array during the scan process.
Another feature was NAS Direct Archive to private cloud object storage (NetApp Storage Grid). With DA you do not need to grow your Rubrik cluster capacity when backing up large terabytes or petabytes of NAS data. The data can go directly to more cost effective object storage.
Veeam also had a session where they announced their ability to do NAS backups and DR orchestration with NetApp snapshots in their upcoming version 10 release. This will be beneficial to our existing Veeam clients in that the existing version 9.5 does not backup NAS shares.
On the HCI front, attending the NetApp HCI and Element Software Roadmap and Vision session (NetApp and partners only) was exciting to see NetApp’s ongoing investment in their HCI platform. The following are some highlights to existing features that will be improving: Management and deployment, NAS on HCI, and Cluster Architecture.
With regards to DevOps, NetApp is continuing to expand their NetApp Kubernetes Service (NKS) which includes on-prem NetApp HCI along with NetApp FlexPod and VMware.
It was outstanding to see that NetApp is supporting REST APIs in ONTAP 9.6. The full feature set is currently not fully available in ONTAP 9.6, but will continue to expand in 9.7 and future releases. I am looking forward to implementing and managing ONTAP clusters via REST APIs. – Jim
Author: Jim Pross, Solutions Architect. Learn more about Jim here.
