NetApp recently made some announcements around its cloud storage capabilities as part of a larger series of product announcements. I thought I’d share some notes and some brief thoughts here.
Azure NetApp Files
New capability – Cost optimisation
- Azure NetApp Files now has a 50 GiB volume minimum size (already available).
- Ideal for Azure Kubernetes Service and smaller databases like SQLite, MySQL, or PostgreSQL
- Pay only for what you need – no more, no less
New capability – Resilience
There’s also preview support for backing up large volumes and performing single file restores from backup.
Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP
There’s a new AWS CloudFormation package Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP that unlocks advanced ONTAP operations, including:
- SnapMirror creation (including ClusterPeer and SVM Peer);
- iSCSI (LUN and iGroup) creation;
- CIFS Share creation;
- Snapshot and Snapshot Policy creation; and
- Advanced Volume creation.
[image courtesy of NetApp]
Thoughts
Why am I writing about FSx for NetApp ONTAP on my weblog? And why should you be interested in a few minor enhancements to this and to Azure NetApp Files? How do these technologies even make sense when the benefits of public cloud are right there? Why would organisations not just use the hyperscaler-native storage solutions available to them? It’s for the same reason that numerous organisations have adopted VMware Cloud on AWS and Azure VMware Solution, sometimes your applications need something different to what the public cloud can offer, at least until those applications have undergone some kind of transformation. I have plenty of customers in my day job taking advantage of FSx for NetApp ONTAP with their VMware Cloud on AWS deployments because the linear scalability of hyper-converged infrastructure has proven problematic for storage-heavy workloads. Additionally, they get the benefit of being able to leverage the NetApp tools they know and love, just in a cloud context. It’s great to see NetApp continue to add features and functionality to both Azure NetApp Files and FSx for NetApp ONTAP. If you’re struggling with shifting storage-dense workloads to public cloud while needing to stay within the confines of a VMware-based solution, these offerings can really help the economics make sense, even for enterprises, not just the t-shirt and jeans cloud-native types.