NetApp has launched the 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 can quickly integrate the best of traditional and emerging technologies, incorporating flash, the cloud and software-defined architectures to build a Data Fabric foundation across on-premises and cloud resources.
Optimized for Flash
ONTAP 9 software is optimized for flash with improved performance and capacity utilization. With this announcement, NetApp says it has become the first all-flash array provider to offer customers 15TB solid state drives (SSDs), which are 50 percent larger than the largest hard-disk drives available today.
NetApp also announced the FlashAdvantage 3-4-5 program, which includes the industry’s only guaranteed efficiency reduction of 4:1. This program makes it simple, cost effective, and low risk for customers to adopt flash.
New inline data compaction enables more data to fit in a smaller footprint and brings down the cost of flash beyond traditional compression and deduplication. This capability increases efficiency and makes NetApp all-flash systems extremely cost-effective compared to hard disk drive-based systems.
Simplicity, Flexibility and Security Across Flash, Disk and Cloud Deployments
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-class data management in the cloud. The new ONTAP Select offers a software-only data management solution.
NetApp claims that 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.
The ONTAP 9 software is the 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.
Customers can 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, according to NetApp.
"Supporting the Large Hadron Collider, the biggest particle accelerator in the world, and its experiments to study the basic constituents of matter, CERN’s database group has been using NetApp products since 2007,” said Miroslav Potocky, database storage service manager, in the IT department at CERN, one of the world’s largest and most respected centers for scientific research.
“Since we started using NetApp clustered FAS systems, they have provided a scalable, stable, high performance environment for our databases, some of which have workloads with up to 1 million changes per second. By using NetApp infrastructure running ONTAP we are able to provide a solution for our most demanding storage use-cases and support CERN's research program towards a better understanding of matter.”
“NetApp technology allows us to be nimble and react quickly to the often volatile changes in the energy sector,” said Hercu Rabsatt, director of infrastructure and service management, Mansfield Oil.
“NetApp has been a key partner in helping us revolutionize our infrastructure for competitive advantage, tying our technology to our business strategy and remediating areas of risk. We’ve had zero downtime for our core business applications since moving them to NetApp ONTAP software. We can always service our customers.”