NetApp simplifies transition to hybrid cloud

NetApp has announced the NetApp ONTAP 9 operating system, a major advance in enterprise data management software that combines new levels of simplicity and flexibility with powerful capabilities and efficiencies. 
With ONTAP 9 software, enterprises can quickly integrate the best of traditional and emerging technologies, incorporating flash, the cloud and software-defined architectures to build a Data Fabric foundation across on-premises and cloud resources.
ONTAP 9 software is optimised for flash with improved performance and capacity utilisation. With this announcement, NetApp becomes the first all-flash array provider to offer customers 15Tb solid state drives (SSDs), which are 50% larger than the largest hard-disk drives available today.
NetApp also announced the FlashAdvantage 3-4-5 programme, which includes the industry’s only guaranteed efficiency reduction of 4:1. This programme makes it simple, cost effective, and low risk for customers to adopt flash.
New inline data compaction enables more data to fit in a smaller footprint and brings down the cost of flash beyond traditional compression and deduplication. This capability increases efficiency and makes NetApp all-flash systems extremely cost-effective compared to hard disk drive-based systems.
Users of ONTAP 9 software have three options to meet their needs. ONTAP 9 is targeted for general on-premises enterprise use, ONTAP Cloud (formerly NetApp Cloud ONTAP) delivers enterprise-class data management in the cloud. The new ONTAP Select offers a software-only data management solution.
ONTAP 9 benefits include:
* Simplicity–Easy to set-up and manage, ONTAP 9 can be deployed and serving data for critical workloads in as few as 10 minutes. Also, with enhanced system monitoring, enterprises can use it to centrally manage performance, capacity and data protection across their IT environment.
* Flexibility–The ONTAP 9 software is the ideal platform for workload consolidation. The platform offers common data services across general purpose server hardware deployments as software defined storage (SDS) in addition to NetApp engineered systems, converged infrastructure, third-party arrays, next-to-the-cloud systems, and the cloud.
* Security–Customers can achieve up to 100 times greater security against drive failures and meet stringent data retention policies with new triple-parity RAID protection and expanded storage encryption and compliance features.