NetApp’s ONTAP 9.4 Hits GA

Announced back in May 2018, NetApp ONTAP 9.4 has officially entered General Availability (GA). It is now available for download at support.netapp.com. ONTAP 9.4 is a data management software designed for cloud-based enterprise all flash systems. Touted as a non-disruptive upgrade ONTAP 9.4 provides new business capabilities in three main categories: new intelligent cloud services with FabricPool; fast all-flash performance with enterprise end-to-end NVMe support; as well as efficient and secure enterprise storage.

Announced back in May 2018, NetApp ONTAP 9.4 has officially entered General Availability (GA). It is now available for download at support.netapp.com. ONTAP 9.4 is a data management software designed for cloud-based enterprise all flash systems. Touted as a non-disruptive upgrade ONTAP 9.4 provides new business capabilities in three main categories: new intelligent cloud services with FabricPool; fast all-flash performance with enterprise end-to-end NVMe support; as well as efficient and secure enterprise storage.

FabricPool, NetApp’s automated cloud tiering solutions, was first released last year as part of ONTAP 9.2. 9.4 brings significant new improvements including:

• Tiering of inactive data from the primary storage to the cloud with savings of up to 50% in primary memory usage
• Tiering of inactive data from the secondary storage to the cloud
• ONTAP SELECT support
• Inactive data reporting to give you a heads-up on what you could be saving
• Support for Microsoft Azure in addition to existing Amazon S3 and NetApp StorageGRID® options

9.4 adds support for 30TB SSDs as well as new key security features:

• Secure purge to cryptographically destroy data for data spillage or GDPR requirements
• Protected controller reboot with passphrase lock of the Onboard Key Manager
• Upgrade image validation to ensure that signed copies of ONTAP are being used
• UEFI secure boot on next-generation platforms

Concurrent with the ONTAP 9.4 announcement back in May, NetApp is offering what it refers to as the first available end-to-end NVMe over fibre channel enterprise platform, the AFF A800. In addition to NVMe solid state drives, the A800 offers both 32Gb Fibre Channel and 100GbE Ethernet. 48 high-capacity SSDs fit in a single 4U chassis. NetApp reports average capacity savings of 4.72:1 counting only deduplication, compression, compaction, and clones. That shoots up to 22:1 when they include snapshots. The array states a latency under 200μs and read throughput of a whopping 300GB/s.

NetApp Main Site

Discuss this story

Sign up for the StorageReview newsletter