NetApp ONTAP Update 9.7

The new management UI for ONTAP System Manager will save you time by showing key system information about capacity, hardware health, networking, and performance history with up to one year of data. Only one screen is needed for provisioning LUNs or NAS volumes. You don’t have to be a storage expert to configure and manage your ONTAP system. If you have a larger environment with multiple clusters, Active IQ Unified Manager will boost your admin productivity. Manage petabytes of data from a single dashboard and receive notifications to proactively and quickly address storage risks so they don’t become problems. New capabilities in Unified Manager provide insights on security risks and compliance.

A great way to get the best value from your all-flash system is to tier cold data to the cloud, leaving more capacity available for hot data that needs ultra-low latency. Since the FabricPool feature of ONTAP was released over two years ago, it’s enabled NetApp customers to tier over 100 PB to the major public clouds – Amazon, Microsoft, Google, – as well as to on-prem private clouds built with NetApp StorageGRID systems. New in this ONTAP release is the ability to simultaneously mirror your tiered data out to multiple clouds. This gives you the flexibility to store your data at multiple cloud providers for added resiliency, and it simplifies the process for changing cloud providers (and do that nondisruptively).

ONTAP has a strong portfolio of security capabilities that protect you from ransomware attacks, data theft, and unauthorized system access. New with ONTAP 9.7, it is simpler to protect your data by automatically enabling data at-rest encryption for new volumes when an encryption key manager is configured on the cluster. 

For your enterprise applications that need non-stop data access, we continue to reduce the cost and deployment time for continuously available environments. You can now use your existing network infrastructure for synchronous mirroring with MetroCluster. Your switches will need to comply with NetApp specs for bandwidth, latency and option settings, since we want to be sure you’ll get the level of business continuity that you’re expecting.  

If you’re using NVMe over Fabric to further improve the performance of your enterprise business applications – or are planning to use it soon – it’s also important to protect this critical data to the level your business requires. Now you can get zero data loss protection (RPO=0) for your NVMe environment using SnapMirror Synchronous replication

There’s more in ONTAP 9.7 is scheduled for release in December 2019, including enhancements for scale-out NAS environments