Home Enterprise NetApp Announces General Availability of ONTAP 9.3

NetApp Announces General Availability of ONTAP 9.3

by Lyle Smith

Announced back in October 2017, NetApp ONTAP 9.3 has officially gone GA today. Touted as a free and easy non-disruptive upgrade, NetApp’s comprehensive proprietary operating system is used in a range of storage disk arrays such as NetApp FAS and AFF, ONTAP Select and ONTAP Cloud. With the GA release, organizations will be able to save time and money coupled with impressive performance and security upgrades.


Announced back in October 2017, NetApp ONTAP 9.3 has officially gone GA today. Touted as a free and easy non-disruptive upgrade, NetApp’s comprehensive proprietary operating system is used in a range of storage disk arrays such as NetApp FAS and AFF, ONTAP Select and ONTAP Cloud. With the GA release, organizations will be able to save time and money coupled with impressive performance and security upgrades.

Users will be able to benefit from some pretty substantial upgrades and enhancements to its Data Fabric as well featuring new software releases like NetApp SolidFire Element, NetApp StorageGRID Webscale, NetApp ONTAP and OnCommand Insight. For NetApp, these solutions are vital to its Data Fabric and provide consistent and integrated hybrid cloud data services to its customers. It will help to accelerate and protect data, reduce costs and enable the seamless building of next-generation architectures.

Key features in ONTAP 9.3 include:

  • Enhance performance — easier performance assurance with Adaptive QoS that simplifies set up with the streamlined application of QoS policies and automatically adapts QoS levels to changes in the workload. 40 percent increased performance compared to previous versions with software optimizations and path parallelization to deliver more IOPS and lower latency.
  • Create efficiencies and save money – 30 percent increased capacity savings by optimizing deduplication. This improved ONTAP efficiency will be incorporated in the NetApp All Flash Capacity guarantee which provides assurance users will achieve workload specific capacity savings or we will make up the difference.
  • Enhance security and compliance – stronger security and new compliance capabilities with external key management for NVE and multi-factor authentication. Users can also apply compliance policies for legal holds and event-based retention.
  • Harness the Power of the Hybrid Cloud with Data Fabric

With OnCommand Insight, customers will be able to leverage new cloud cost monitoring tools. This will provide a complete picture of IT infrastructure no matter where it is located (i.e. on-premise or in the cloud), which will help organizations realize the potential of the hybrid cloud when using Data Fabric.

Capabilities of OnCommand Insight cloud cost include:

  • Monitor: Gain visibility of cloud spent across departments, lines of business and applications
  • Control: Control, improve and enforce cloud spend behavior across the organization
  • Optimize: Save cost by leveraging the most efficient vendor pricing structure

StorageReview has a NetApp AFF A300 in our lab that we are currently reviewing with ONTAP 9.3 installed.

NetApp ONTAP

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