NetApp Releases ONTAP 9

Today NetApp announced the release of its latest operating system, ONTAP 9. NetApp claims that the latest updated OS will be a major advancement in data management combining higher simplicity and flexibility with new capabilities. It has been a bit since the last major update of ONTAP, and NetApp states the latest software will allow integration of both traditional, current, and emerging technologies.

Today NetApp announced the release of its latest operating system, ONTAP 9. NetApp claims that the latest updated OS will be a major advancement in data management combining higher simplicity and flexibility with new capabilities. It has been a bit since the last major update of ONTAP, and NetApp states the latest software will allow integration of both traditional, current, and emerging technologies.

It has been several years since ONTAP 8 came out and much has changed in the industry. Most notably is that flash adoption has become the norm and flash is ubiquitous in data centers. ONTAP 9 has been optimized for flash, which in turn, will help increase performance. A big improvement in the software, and at the time of this writing the only all-flash array vendor to offer this, is the support for 15TB SSDs. These SSDs, such as the Samsung PM1633a, are much larger than the highest shipping HDDs on the market.

Along with support for the new and upcoming huge capacity SSDs, is NetApp’s FlashAdvantage 3-4-5 program. This program guarantees a 4:1 reduction ratio. On top of that ONTAP 9 will also have NetApp’s new patented inline data compaction which pushes data reduction to an even smaller footprint. These data compression technologies should make NetApp’s all-flash systems cost-effective when compared to an HDD-based system.

The new ONTAP 9 is said to support all the systems NetApp has released in the last 5 years and will be available in 3 options: ONTAP 9 is targeted for general on-premises enterprise use, ONTAP Cloud (formerly NetApp Cloud ONTAP) delivers enterprise-class data management in the cloud and 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—NetApp claims 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.

Availability

NetApp ONTAP 9 is available now.

NetApp's site

Discuss This Story

Sign up for the StorageReview newsletter