NetApp ONTAP 9 Data Management Software
Simplify Your Transition to the Modern Data Center

Overview:

Businesses today need to address competitive pressures by evolving into digital enterprises that speed innovation and enable better business decisions. They must take a more modern approach to their data storage while integrating into their existing environment. Businesses must also manage data wherever it resides-on the premises and in the cloud-while reducing costs and operating with existing IT staff.

Simplify your transition to a modern data center with NetApp ONTAP 9, the next generation of the industry's leading enterprise data management software. It combines new levels of simplicity and flexibility with powerful data management capabilities and storage efficiencies. With ONTAP 9, you can build a hybrid cloud that is the foundation of a Data Fabric that spans flash, disk, and cloud. Seamlessly manage your data as it flows to wherever you need it most to make the best possible decisions for your organization. ONTAP 9 addresses the challenges that face your digital enterprise by:

• Simplifying deployment and data management
• Flexibly supporting your changing business needs
• Powering your enterprise applications

You can simplify your storage environment with proven operational efficiency. Deploy new workloads-Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, VDI, and VMware-in under 10 minutes. Automate important processes to increase productivity. Gain a global view of your storage with a single management console. Perform updates during regular work hours without disrupting applications or users.

With ONTAP 9, flexibly deploy on your choice of architectures-engineered systems, software-defined storage (SDS), and the cloud-while unifying data management across all of them. You can modernize your infrastructure with new software stacks such as Dockers and OpenStack. Add capacity as you grow across both SAN and NAS environments. Plus, combine all-flash, hard disk drive, and hybrid drive storage nodes into a larger storage cluster and connect them to the cloud, enabling you to nondisruptively move and access your data from the node that delivers the best combination of performance, capacity, and cost efficiency.

Accelerate your enterprise applications with flash while not compromising on the rich data services that you need. You can start small and grow with your business by scaling your storage environment, leveraging high-capacity SSDs or hard disk drives (HDDs) and growing up to 24 nodes in a cluster. Reduce your overall storage costs by leveraging leading ONTAP data reduction technologies to minimize your storage footprint and maximize your effective capacity. Plus, you are able to service your infrastructure without disrupting access to user data and applications, even during regular business hours. With ONTAP 9, support your business operations with continuous availability and leading data protection.

Unify data management across flash, disk, and cloud to simplify your storage environment. Transition to NetApp ONTAP 9.

Make the simple, fast move to NetApp ONTAP 9, next generation of the industry-leading data management software created to unify your storage infrastructure. ONTAP 9 bridges new and traditional data center architectures. It builds the foundation for a data fabric, making it easy to move your data where it's needed across flash, disk, and cloud resources.

Simplify deployment and data management

• Deploy new solutions in less than 10 minutes with fast provisioning templates.
• Reduce storage footprint and costs with leading inline data reduction.
• Centrally manage from a single pane of glass.

Maximize data center agility

• Leverage the architecture of your choice: NetApp engineered systems, software-defined storage, and the cloud.
• Deploy both SAN and NAS workloads on a unified storage architecture.
• Flexibly cluster flash and disk nodes to optimize performance and capacity-up to 138PB.
• Provision storage in seconds with cloud automation and data center orchestration.

Power your enterprise applications

• Increase application performance with 20x faster response times.
• Provide continuous availability to eliminate planned and unplanned downtime.
• Protect and rapidly restore data with integrated back-up and disaster recovery

Simplify Deployment and Management

Whether adding new workloads or managing your existing environment, it is important to simplify your processes to maximize the efficiency of your staff. ONTAP gives you a common set of features across deployment architectures, which simplifies complex tasks so your IT staff can be more productive and focus on addressing business priorities. When your storage doubles in size, it no longer means that you have twice as much work to manage.

Deploy in less than 10 minutes
New fast provisioning workflows enable you to deploy key workloads-Oracle, SQL Server, VDI, and VMware-in under 10 minutes from power-on to serving data. Years of NetApp experience and best practices are integrated into the system manager wizard and factory configurations, enabling you to quickly set up your new configuration by answering a few questions. And as you deploy new workloads, ONTAP 9 gives you the visibility to know which node has the most performance capacity available for optimally deploying the new workload.

Unified data management
Simplify operations by unifying data management across a hybrid cloud that can span flash, disk, and cloud running SAN and NAS workloads. You can increase the efficiency of your staff and easily move your data between nodes to where it's needed most. ONTAP is the foundation for a Data Fabric that gives you freedom, choice, and control across your storage environment.

Simplified, powerful management capabilities
The NetApp OnCommand software portfolio includes management products ideally suited to manage virtualized private and hybrid cloud environments. You can centrally monitor capacity, availability, performance, and data protection. And take advantage of storage service analytics to make better informed decisions about your storage. Use our OnCommand management platform to automate your storage processes. Plus, integrate the storage processes into your data center orchestration platform for end-to-end service delivery for your private and hybrid cloud services.

Flexibly Support Your Changing Business Needs

ONTAP 9 provides the flexibility you need to design and deploy your storage environment across the widest range of architectures, so you can match the approach that's best for your evolving business needs:

• NetApp engineered systems: all-flash AFF systems and hybrid disk FAS systems
• Converged infrastructure: FlexPod
• On commodity servers as SDS: ONTAP Select
• In front of third-party arrays: FlexArray
• Next to the cloud: NetApp Private Storage (NPS) for Cloud
• In the cloud: ONTAP Cloud

You can seamlessly move your data between each to get your data onto the optimal environment for performance, capacity, and cost efficiency. Plus, you have the flexibility to consolidate both NAS and SAN workloads onto any ONTAP environment while delivering consistent data services.

Power Your Enterprise Applications

To support your critical applications, you need a storage environment that cost-effectively delivers high performance and availability that can scale with business growth and protect your valuable data. ONTAP 9 delivers on all these requirements with highly efficient flash performance for scalable, nondisruptive operations.

Optimized for flash
ONTAP 9 delivers the horsepower that critical applications require without compromising on rich data services. AFF systems running ONTAP 9 are optimized specifically for flash, providing up to 60% more performance compared to the same workloads running on recent ONTAP 8 releases, while still delivering consistent submillisecond latency. ONTAP 9 also enables FAS hybrid storage systems to deliver flash-accelerated performance that is balanced with HDD economies. Hot data is automatically cached in flash to accelerate application performance.

Nondisruptive operations
ONTAP allows you to perform critical tasks without interrupting your business. You can dynamically assign, promote, and retire storage resources without downtime over the lifecycle of an application. Data can be moved between controllers without application interruption. Plus, storage controllers and disk shelves can be replaced without disruption. With ONTAP, you also can mix models and generations of hardware to extend the life of existing investments.

Integrated data protection
ONTAP provides integrated data protection (IDP) to safeguard your operations and keep them running smoothly. Technologies include space-efficient Snapshot® technology, near-instant backup and recovery with SnapVault, and synchronous and asynchronous replication with MetroCluster and SnapMirror, which can meet your requirements for business continuity and disaster recovery. To meet your stringent compliance and data retention policies, NetApp SnapLock software enables Write Once, Read Many (WORM) protected data for your ONTAP environment. NetApp also provides superior integration with enterprise backup vendors and leading applications. Plus, our IDP solutions include integrated and unified disk-to-disk backup and disaster recovery in a single process for VMware and Microsoft virtualization.

Consolidate data management across architectures with a rich set of enterprise data services.

Superior storage efficiency
With ONTAP, you can reduce costs with one of the most comprehensive storage efficiency offerings in the industry. You get innovative NetApp Snapshot copies, thin provisioning, and replication and cloning technologies. Plus, inline data compression, deduplication, and compaction work together to reduce your storage costs and maximize your effective capacity.

Maximized shared storage investments
ONTAP lets you save time and money by sharing the same consolidated infrastructure for workloads or tenants that have different performance, capacity, and security requirements without fear that the activity in one tenant partition will affect another. With multitenancy, a storage cluster can be subdivided into secure partitions governed by rights and permissions. And quality of service (QoS) workload management allows you to control the resources that each workload can consume, to better manage performance spikes and improve customer satisfaction.

Stay ahead of business changes with seamless scalability
Storage systems that run ONTAP can transparently scale SAN and NAS from a few terabytes up to 138PB. Scale up by adding SSD and HDD capacity. Or scale out by adding additional storage controllers to seamlessly expand your cluster up to 24 nodes as your business needs grow. You can also rebalance capacity to improve service levels by redeploying workloads dynamically and avoiding hot spots. Most scale-out storage solutions provide a single large repository. ONTAP takes a different approach that gives you more flexibility and greater control. NetApp Infinite Volumes let you create large, flexible, and easy-to-manage content repositories. You also have the ability to isolate workloads and offer levels of service by using different controller technologies, storage tiers, and QoS policies. In addition, you can span multiple controllers for nearly limitless scalability.

Maximize Investment Protection

ONTAP gives you the flexibility to create an integrated, scalable storage environment by clustering storage controllers from different families-AFF and FAS-as well as from different generations. Grow with the latest hardware and continue to use your older hardware. When it's time to retire a storage system, you can simply upgrade the controllers and keep data in place on the existing disk shelves. Plus, you can get more value from your existing investments in third-party arrays by virtualizing them with NetApp FlexArray virtualization and using the storage capacity in your ONTAP environment.

Simple, Straightforward Transition to ONTAP 9

No matter what your starting point, NetApp streamlines your move to ONTAP 9:

• Upgrade from ONTAP 8.3 with a simple update of your ONTAP software. No disruption. Zero downtime.
• Make a smooth transition from ONTAP 7-Mode with proven tools and best practices, including 7-Mode Transition Tool (7MTT) and Copy Free Transition (CFT).
• Use straightforward import processes from third-party storage to ONTAP 9.

Consult our experts to plan and implement your transition and gain the latest ONTAP advantages from day one. You can use NetApp Services or NetApp Certified Services Partners, do it yourself using our proven tools and processes, or combine these approaches.