Data management software integrates the best of traditional and emerging technologies to provide foundation for customers’ next-generation Data Fabric architecture.

“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 revolutionise 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.”

NetApp today announced 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.

Optimised for Flash

ONTAP 9 software is optimised for flash with improved performance and capacity utilisation. With this announcement, NetApp becomes 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.  

“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-optimised, 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.”

“We’ve helped enterprise clients leverage flash to deliver greater performance, scalability, and availability. With the advent of ONTAP 9, 15TB SSDs and the FlashAdvantage 3-4-5 program, our clients will benefit from greater simplicity, flexibility, and cost savings and build a strong foundation to maximize the business value of IT,” said Jason Anderson, chief architect, Datalink.  

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. 

ONTAP 9 benefits 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 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.  

· Security—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. 

"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 centres 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.”

“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 at NetApp. “ONTAP 9 delivers real economic value that reduces the cost of flash, introduces a cost-effective software consumption model, and standardises data management across disk, flash and cloud resources. With ONTAP 9, we are helping customers and partners convert our feature innovations to business value.”