ONTAP 9.7: Do More – with Less Time and Effort

It's late-October, which means it's almost Halloween. It's also time for NetApp®Insight, our customerconference in Las Vegas - as well as anotherupdate to our NetApp ONTAP®ecosystem. We know you need to efficiently and securely manageyour company's dataacross your hybrid cloud, so every six months we rollout a new release of ourONTAP data management softwareto help you with yourkey challenges. You've told us youarewrestling withissues such as cloudintegration, security, business continuity, andsimplifying storage administration. This latest ONTAP release- ONTAP 9.7 -has many enhancements to let you do more with less time and effort.

Which of these are your primary challenges?

Simplifying operations:

• Do you have a lean staff that is primarily IT generalists?The mostsignificantupdatein this ONTAP releaseis how simple we've made itto manage your ONTAP environment. The new management UI for ONTAP System Managerwill saveyoutimeby 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 LUNsor NAS volumes.You don't have to be a storage expert to configure and manage your ONTAP system.If youhave a larger environment with multiple clusters, Active IQ Unified Managerwill boost your admin productivity. Manage petabytes of data from a single dashboardand receive notifications to proactively and quickly address storage risksso they don't become problems. New capabilities in Unified Managerprovideinsights on security risks and compliance

Building your hybrid cloud:

• A great way to get the best value from your all-flash system is to tier cold data to the cloud, leaving morecapacityavailableforhot datathat needsultra-low latency. Since the FabricPool feature of ONTAP was releasedovertwo years ago, it'senabledour customers to tierover 100PBto the majorpublic clouds- Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, and IBM - as well asto on-prem private clouds built withNetApp StorageGRID systems.New in this ONTAP releaseis the ability tosimultaneouslymirror your tiereddata out to multiple clouds. This gives you the flexibilityto storeyour data atmultiple cloud providers for added resiliency,and it simplifies the process for changing cloud providers(and do thatnondisruptively).

Securing your data:

• ONTAP has astrongportfolio of security capabilitiesthat protect you from ransomware attacks, data theft, and unauthorized system access.New with ONTAP 9.7, we've made it simpler to protect your data by automatically enabling dataat-rest encryption for new volumes when an encryption key manager is configured on the cluster.

Delivering business continuity:

• For your enterprise applications that need non-stop data access, wecontinue to reduce the cost and deployment time forcontinuously availableenvironments. You can now use your existing network infrastructurefor synchronous mirroringwith 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.

Protecting your data in NVMeenvironments:

• If you'reusing NVMeover Fabricto 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 tothe level your business requires. Now you can get zero data loss protection (RPO=0) for your NVMe environmentusing SnapMirror Synchronous replication.

There's more in ONTAP 9.7, which will be available in November, including enhancementsforscale-out NAS environments.Learn more today about how ONTAPcan help you solve your business challenges. And look for upcoming technical blogs and podcasts that will dive into the details on all the new enhancementsin ONTAP 9.7, System Manager, and Unified Manager.

Want to take a free test drive of ONTAP? Try oursoftware-defined version to check out its leading capabilities.

Are you coming to NetApp Insight this week? If so, stop by the ONTAP booth in the NetApp Pavilion to talk with our expertsand learn how ONTAP can help you to simplify the managementofall your data wherever it's located across your hybrid cloud. Do more, with less time and effort.