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NetApp Announces ONTAP 9! All Release Info Here!

May 30, 2016 By Adam Bergh 5 Comments

imageUpdate: You can now download ONTAP 9 GA from here: http://mysupport.netapp.com/NOW/download/software/ontap/9.0/

There’s so much here, so let’s start with the obvious first – The Name Change. NetApp’s flagship OS “Clustered DataONTAP” is now simple just “ONTAP” with the new release to simply be known as “ONTAP 9”. What’s also a bit different is that NetApp will not refer to ONTAP as an OS, but rather just “NetApp® ONTAP® software.” This has a lot to do with the upcoming release of ONTAP Select, the version of ONTAP that will run on white box hardware (more on that later). Other slight name changes include the renaming of NetApp Cloud ONTAP to just “ONTAP Cloud.”

Here’s a chart comparing the old and new names:

image
What’s Not Changing:
Technical references to specific Data ONTAP products—including clustered Data ONTAP, Data ONTAP 8.x, and Data ONTAP operating in 7-Mode.

So why the name change and why now? In a word, simplicity. NetApp is heading in the right direction here. NetApp has never been known as the array that’s the most simple to use and operate, but you’ll see that with ONTAP 9 and all utilities going forward this will be a major focus for NetApp and it starts with the name change. A good portion of what’s new in the ONTAP 9 release is to simplify deployments and operations.

Let’s talk about new features in ONTAP 9

This is not meant to be a full list, just some of what I think is really cool.

1. New RAID format: RAID-TEC (Triple Erasure Encoding). This new RAID format is designed for triple parity protection for the larger SATA and SSD disk sizes. This will essentially allow for much larger RAID Group sizes on the large disks. Translation: More usable space and better protection of large drives sizes. RAID-TEC will be the default going forward on any drives 6TB and larger and required for drives 10TB and larger. You will be able to covert existing RAID-DP aggregates non-disruptively to RAID-TEC groups as well. Keep an eye out for an upcoming blog post for more in depth breakdown of RAID-TEC.

image

2. New inline data reduction technology: Compaction. From the company that pioneered data dedupe and compression on tier 1 data, comes a brand new technology from NetApp: Compaction. So what the heck is Compaction? First of all, NetApp currently has inline dedupe and inline compression. Compaction works inline in conjunction with dedupe and compression. The idea of compaction is that storage space usage can be considerably reduced if multiple I/Os or files can be stored together in a singular 4KB block. Compaction happens on logical blocks as they are being organized before being written to storage. NetApp claims this process uses very little CPU and has no performance impact. I’ll detail the space savings on existing volumes as soon as I have a chance to try out this new tech.

imageimage

 

3. Onboard Key Manager for Full Disk Encryption at rest! Making full disk encryption more easily accessible is always a good thing. One of the most welcome features of ONTAP 9 has to be onboard key management. This feature was designed to quickly and simply deploy encryption at rest technology. Only a single passphrase is required to set this up. All keys are automatically generated and stored locally in the ONTAP cluster. Most importantly, no need to manage encryption keys! Of course, external key management (KMIP) servers are still supported as needed, but I’m digging this new feature.

 

 

4. Advanced Data Partition Enhancements – NetApp has put a ton of work into enhancing the “ADP” feature that was release in ONTAP 8.3. If you recall, the idea of this feature was to return a ton of usable space that was locked up in the required root aggregates in ONTAP. This ended up being a huge improvement in usable space from RAW. The new enhancements in ONTAP 9 take this idea and expand on it further, which is now even more critical with the larger SSD drive sizes hitting the street. NetApp estimates that the changes in ADP will return 17% more usable space in 24-drive configurations vs 8.3.x implementations. Not bad at all.

image

Other Enhancements:

  • SnapLock returns. If you remember this feature from the 7-mode days, this gives storage operators WORM capabilities and greater compliance with data retention requirements by being able to lock data in place and guarantee that it has been unaltered.

 

  • All Flash Performance Enhancements. It seems that every release from NetApp bumps up performance on all-flash configurations, and ONTAP 9 is no different.  NetApp claims that ONTAP 9 should produce 60% more IOPS versus 8.3.1 code.

 

  • Faster take over and give back performance.  Planned and unplanned failovers should be much faster in ONTAP 9  vs. previous releases. NetApp is claiming ONTAP 9 should have these events down to 2-15 seconds.image

 

  • Enhanced Analytics. Keep an eye out for a new “head-room” metric that works in conjunction with the upcoming OnCommand Performance Manager 3.0. The idea of this new feature will be to show how “utilized” each node in a cluster is. This provides insight into how much additional workload your system is able to handle.

image

 

  • System Manager Enhancements. The evolution of the on cluster System Manager software continues with ONTAP 9:
    • New menu placements
    • Real-time performance graphs on any object in the cluster are some of the highlights

image

  • ONTAP Select – This one is going to require a whole dedicated blog post for, so keep an eye out for that. In a nutshell this is a full ONTAP 9 single node or 4-node cluster that runs as virtual machines on any hardware. This is the full goodness that is ONTAP with the full flexibility to run on any commodity hardware! This is certainly an evolution of ONTAP Edge, but EDGE was never multi-node clusters with HA. More to come on this.

Hardware Announcements

With all that is new with ONTAP 9, let’s not forget about all the new hardware announcements as well.

  • 15.3 TB SSD – Yes, you read that right. Don’t let the start-ups let you think they’ve cornered the market on innovation. NetApp is first to the market with 15.3TB SSD in a 2.5” form factor. Imagine a single 2 rack unit high – 24 drive shelf full of 15.3TB SSD drives. NetApp is now estimating a 4:1 effective capacity on All-Flash FAS running ONTAP 9. If those numbers hold, a single shelf of these drives would yield over 1PB effective capacity!
  • New 12GB SAS Disk Shelves –With shiny new SSD drives we’re going to need some new SAS shelves, correct? In step the new 12GB SAS drive shelves. Take a look at the new drive shelves being announced below. Historically the last digit in the NetApp shelf ID has been the SAS speed of the shelf. So why “C” you ask? “C” just happens to be “12” in hexadecimal.

image

 

Want to try on ONTAP 9 for yourself? Neil Anderson over at FlackBox.com has produced a free ebook on how to set up an ONTAP 9 simulator on your workstation to try out all the lovely ONTAP goodness. You can get the free ebook HERE. Thanks Neil!

 

 

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Filed Under: Data Center, NetApp Tagged With: NetApp, ONTAP 9, Storage

NetApp Releases the EF560 All Flash Array

January 27, 2015 By Adam Bergh 2 Comments

Speed freaks rejoice! Your calls for even more massive speed have been answered!

Today NetApp announces an update to the massively popular EF550 All-Flash Array – the EF560, and what’s in store for your IOPs hungry apps is nothing short of incredible!

The EF560 builds on the proven enterprise reliability and performance, and density of the previous gen EF540 and EF550 models, and takes it to a whole new level of performance.

For those out there reading this that don’t know much about NetApp’s E-Series line of storage, here is a quick refresher:

  • E-Series arrays block only (ISCSI and FC) performance and density optimized arrays.
  • E-Series arrays run the “SANtricity” operating system, not to be confused with Data ONTAP, NetApp’s unified protocol OS.
  • They are designed for speed and simplicity of operation. See my post on how to Deploy One in 30 Minutes
  • They employ several RAID types, but most notably the “Dynamic Disk Pool” feature, which takes all the complexity out of setting up and managing an array’s potentially daunting amount of disks.

On to the juicy details of the EF560 AFA!

image

As you can see from the below details, we have similar specs to the previous gen EF550 array, with the added addition of the much needed 12GB SAS and 54GB Infiniband connectivity options.

imageimage

But what’s really the meat of this release is SPEED, and lots of it! Check on these performance test results:

image

Yes people, this is 650,000 IOPs at sub .8ms latency! What’s notable here as well is that there are little to no difference in the performance of the DDP RAID type vs. RAID-5 and RAID-10!

Check out some Oracle performance numbers:

image

image

image

 

On OLTP Databases, the EF560 has 2.5x improvement over the previous gen EF550!

image

Overall, this is a major performance lead forward for this All Flash offering from NetApp. This is a powerhouse monster that is going to turn a lot of heads and leave more than a few competitors scratching their heads.

Update: The Storage Performance Council (SPC) has released the results from the EF560 – Spoiler Alert! They are pretty amazing. You can download the full report here: http://www.storageperformance.org/benchmark_results_files/SPC-1/NetApp/A00152_NetApp_EF560/a00152_NetApp_EF560_SPC-1_executive-summary.pdf

 

Filed Under: Data Center, E-Series, NetApp, Storage

Why Your Future Data Center will be “Converged”

August 18, 2014 By Adam Bergh Leave a Comment

Unless you’ve been living under a rock the past decade you know that the data center server footprint has been shrinking dramatically. With the advent of server virtualization and individual servers that can now have a TB or more of RAM, it is increasingly common to see what was once rows of traditional servers condensed into a single cabinet. CFOs love the reduced capital costs that server virtualization provides; CTOs love the increased asset utilization.

However, the “miracle” that is data center server virtualization is not without increase: rises in storage and network administration usually follow. In other words, a reduced physical footprint does not necessarily equate to a proportional reduction in IT management personnel. Internal company resources are now demanding faster, more complex, and more automated deployments of resources. In fact, data center virtualization has effectively introduced a whole host of new challenges that include not only the typical management of hundreds if not thousands of easily deployed server and/or desktop operating systems, but also the overlaid applications and physical hosts, along with their corresponding network and storage requirements.

The modern datacenter is a software-defined datacenter; in today’s computing era, it is not only common but expected that a company will make full use of one or more virtualization technologies.

 

What is “Converged Infrastructure?”

IDC defines converged infrastructure as “the development of a data center (or closet) based on a set of standard elements (e.g., x86 processors for compute, PCI for the system bus, and 10GbE for internode and storage connections). By leveraging hypervisor and storage virtualization software, these “chunks” can then be dynamically partitioned and automatically rebalanced to support a pool of different business applications.”

In simple terms, it’s the marriage of storage, networking, and compute into an elegant, flexible, unified solution. Think if it as an infrastructure building block.

If you haven’t heard of who the major players are in the Converged Infrastructure world, check out IDC’s data below. As you can see this is a trend that is accelerating rapidly and is no small potatoes idea.

Top 3 Vendors, Worldwide Integrated Infrastructure, Q1 2014 (Revenues are in Millions)

Vendor 1Q14 Revenue 1Q14 Market Share 1Q13 Revenue 1Q13 Market Share 1Q14/1Q13 Revenue Growth
1. Cisco/NetApp $268.4 22.7% $179.2 25.7% 49.8%
2. VCE $254.3 21.5% $176.8 25.4% 43.8%
3. EMC $179.9 15.2% $89.9 12.9% 100.2%
All Others $477.4 40.5% $251.0 36.0% 90.2%
Total $1,180.1 100% $696.8 100% 69.4%

Source: IDC Worldwide Integrated Infrastructure & Platforms Tracker, June 26, 2014

As you can see the Cisco/NetApp collaboration called “FlexPod” is the current market leader. For a quick primer on what FlexPod is, check out this video below:

FlexPod Intro via NetApp’s YouTube Channel

What Are the Benefits of “Converged Infrastructure”

By deploying a converged infrastructure such as a FlexPod that contains unified storage, servers, and networks, an IT organization will see the following benefits:

  • Reduced risk with proven validated designs from the industry leaders in converged infrastructure.
  • Massive boosts to operational efficiency and agility to meet key business initiatives.
  • Lower cost per user without sacrificing scalability
  • Improved consolidation of storage, server and network resources through the use of 10Gbe, FCoE, virtualization, and highly integrated storage.
  • Cost reductions through the seamless ability to migrate data resources (servers and storage) non-disruptively
  • Enable faster, more reliable recovery of data and applications.
  • Reduce risk of data lost and associated costs.

Considerations in Moving to a “Converged Infrastructure”

For many organizations, moving from a traditional data center architecture to a converged model requires the right partner to help you achieve a successful rollout into the new future of your data center. Netech Corp is an industry leading in FlexPod converged solutions and has many years of successfully deploying this solution in all market verticals.

Check out some references from Netech customers who have implemented FlexPod solutions.

Authenticom:

image

Please read the Authenticom Case Study

Group Health Cooperative:

image

 

Please read the Group Health Cooperative Case Study

Filed Under: Data Center, NetApp, Virtualization, VMware Tagged With: FlexPod NetApp Converged IDC Netech

Introducing the Cisco UCS 6324 Fabric Interconnect!

July 15, 2014 By Adam Bergh 1 Comment

Today Cisco has announced the general availability of an all new Unified Computing System Fabric Interconnect, the 6324.

What’s so cool about this new Fabric Interconnect and why should you care?

In a nutshell the new 6324 FI is a converged Fabric Interconnect and IOM in one unit that plugs directly into the UCS 5108 Chassis. This is squarely aimed at the SMB market for environments that will never need to grow beyond 8 blades and/or four C-series servers.

To quote Cisco: “The Cisco UCS 6324 Fabric Interconnect extends the Cisco UCS architecture into environments with requirements for smaller domains. Providing the same unified server and networking capabilities as in the full-scale Cisco UCS solution, the Cisco UCS 6324 embeds the connectivity within the Cisco UCS 5108 Blade Server Chassis to provide a smaller domain of up to 12 servers (8 blade servers and up to 4 direct-connect rack servers).”

“The Cisco UCS 6324 is built to consolidate LAN and storage traffic onto a single unified fabric, eliminating the capital expenditures (CapEx) and operating expenses (OpEx) associated with multiple parallel networks, different types of adapter cards, switching infrastructure, and cabling within racks. The unified ports allow the fabric interconnect to support direct connections from Cisco UCS to Fibre Channel, FCoE, and Small Computer System Interface over IP (iSCSI) storage devices.”

Pricing looks really good on these as well, and should knock a significant chunk of change off a B-Series sale for the SMB market. Really looking forward to getting the word out on these! Going to be a huge hit in the market in my opinion!

 

Let’s take a look at the new Fabric Interconnect:

 

As you can see it has four standard SFP+ ports that can be used for network or FC uplinks or for direct attached storage (FC/FCoE/ISCSI/NFS all supported). There is also one QSFP port that supports direct attached C-Series servers or direct attached storage.

 

Here is how Cisco envisions a design with the 6324 FI:

 

Here are a couple photos of these bad boys out in the wild! They look great!

clip_image001[4]

clip_image001

Filed Under: Cisco, Data Center, UCS Tagged With: 6324, Cisco, Cisco UCS

Introducing the NetApp FAS2500! Get All Launch Details Here!

June 17, 2014 By Adam Bergh Leave a Comment

Today NetApp is announcing an all new line of hardware for their entry level customers.

Introducing the FAS2520, FAS2552, and the FAS2554!

With these new models NetApp continues to extend their leadership in entry hybrid arrays. These new models deliver superior flexibility and a more powerful unified storage platform.

All three new models include next-gen connectivity through 10GBase-T Ethernet or unified FC, FCoE, and Ethernet (UTA2) ports!

These new models make massive improvements in I/O consistency and enhance flash acceleration greatly over the previous FAS2200 entry line.

All three FAS2550 models will offer 3x memory to enhance the already industry-leading performance and will support even more  more flash integration

We will get to the specs but check out the expanded scale-out support allows for clusters of 8 nodes totaling over 2.3PB of raw capacity!

Let’s Check out the new models!

image

The NetApp FAS2520

The new NetApp FAS2520 is a pretty nice piece of hardware for the entry level/branch office workloads.

It is a 2U box that has some pretty impressive specs.

  • 36GB memory
  • 32GB physical memory + 4GB NVMEM
  • Four 64-bit cores running at 1.73GHz
  • Single dual-core processor per controllerimage
  • Offers low-cost 10G Base-T ports
  • NFS, CIFS, and iSCSI are supported
  • GbE management port
  • Faster install with System Setup
  • New bezel

Included software

  • All supported data protocols
  • Efficiency: FlexVol® volumes, deduplication, compression, and thin provisioning
  • Availability: Multipath I/O, MultiStore® technology
  • Performance: FlexShare® storage QoS
  • Data protection: RAID-DP®, Snapshot™, and Open Systems SnapVault® technologies
  • Management: System Setup, OnCommand® System Manager, OnCommand Unified Manager

The FAS2520 Rear View:

image

The NetApp FAS2552

The FAS2552 is also a 2U box that has some pretty impressive specs, similar to the FAS2520

  • 36GB memory
  • 32GB physical memory + 4GB NVMEM
  • Four 64-bit cores running at 1.73GHzimage
  • Single dual-core processor per controller
  • 4 UTA2 Ports that can to 10GBe or 16GB FC
  • NFS, CIFS, and iSCSI are supported
  • GbE management port
  • Faster install with System Setup
  • New bezel

Included software is the same as the FAS2520

  • All supported data protocols
  • Efficiency: FlexVol® volumes, deduplication, compression, and thin provisioning
  • Availability: Multipath I/O, MultiStore® technology
  • Performance: FlexShare® storage QoS
  • Data protection: RAID-DP®, Snapshot™, and Open Systems SnapVault® technologies
  • Management: System Setup, OnCommand® System Manager, OnCommand Unified Manager

image

The NetApp FAS2554

The FAS2552 is also a 4U box that has same impressive specs as the other 25xx models.

  • 36GB memoryimage
  • 32GB physical memory + 4GB NVMEM
  • Four 64-bit cores running at 1.73GHz
  • Single dual-core processor per controller
  • 4 UTA2 Ports that can to 10GBe or 16GB FC
  • NFS, CIFS, and iSCSI are supported
  • GbE management port
  • Faster install with System Setup
  • New bezel

Included software is the same as the FAS2520

  • All supported data protocols
  • Efficiency: FlexVol® volumes, deduplication, compression, and thin provisioning
  • Availability: Multipath I/O, MultiStore® technology
  • Performance: FlexShare® storage QoS
  • Data protection: RAID-DP®, Snapshot™, and Open Systems SnapVault® technologies
  • Management: System Setup, OnCommand® System Manager, OnCommand Unified Manager

image


HA Config

FAS2554

FAS2552

FAS2520

clip_image002[4]

 

clip_image004[4]

clip_image005[4]

Application environments

Midsize organizations and distributed sites of larger organizations

Midsize organizations and distributed sites of larger organizations that require smaller form factor and lower power consumption

Smaller organizations, remote offices, and local storage

Ideal for

Higher-capacity and performance needs

Higher-performance needs

Value-oriented deployments

Maximum raw capacity[1]

576TB

518TB

336TB

Maximum disk drives

144

144

84

Controller form factor

4U/24-drive

2U/24-drive

2U/12-drive

ECC memory

36GB

36GB

36GB

Maximum Flash PoolÔ

4TB

4TB

4TB

NVMEM/NVRAM

4GB

4GB

4GB

On-board I/O: UTA 2 (8Gb FC/16Gb FC/FCoE/ 10GbE)

8[2]

83

N/A

On-board I/O:

10GBASE-T

N/A

N/A

8[3]

On-board I/O: GbE

4

4

4

On-board I/O: 6Gb SAS

4

4

4

OS version

Data ONTAP 8.2.2 or later

Shelves and media

See the Shelves and Media page (http://www.netapp.com/us/products/storage-systems/disk-shelves-and-storage-media/index.aspx) on NetApp.com for the most current information

Storage protocols

FCP, iSCSI, NFS, CIFS, FCoE

FCP, iSCSI, NFS, CIFS, FCoE

iSCSI, NFS, CIFS

Host/client operating systems supported

Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows ServerÒ 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2012, Windows XP, LinuxÒ, OracleÒ Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, AppleÒ Mac OSÒ, VMware ESXÒ


[1] Maximum raw capacity depends on the drive offerings. See the Shelves and Media page (http://www.netapp.com/us/products/storage-systems/disk-shelves-and-storage-media/index.aspx) on NetApp.com for the most current information.

[2] FAS2552 and FAS2554 on-board ports can be configured as either an 8Gb/16Gb FC port pair or a 10GbE port pair and mixed combinations.

[3] FAS2520 on-board ports are 10GBASE-T only.

 

Filed Under: Data Center, NetApp, Storage

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A Little About Me…

Adam Bergh is a storage and virtualization expert - cloud computing junkie. You can follow him on twitter and via this blog for insights and opinions on the latest SAN, virtual data center and cloud technology.

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Areas of Expertise:

Data Centers, VMware VSphere, NetApp SAN and NAS, Cisco UCS, Cisco Nexus, FlexPod, Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning

Certifications:

VMWare VCP4/VCP5, VTSP, NetApp NCIE, NCDA, Cisco UCS, CCNA, MCSE, MCSE+Security, MCSA, MCSA+Security, MCP, CompTIA Security+, Compellent SAN

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