Netapp FAS 90 deep dive

Economy

Achieve the lowest data life cycle cost with long-term investment in storage infrastructure. Focus on simplifying the storage environment and reducing the total cost of ownership. The FAS system offers significant advantages:

• Reduce costs and minimize storage space: Automatically migrate infrequently used data to more cost-effective object storage on-premises or in the cloud without reconstructing applications.
• Eliminate silos: Support NAS, SAN, and object workloads on a unified system.
• Fast Deployment: Under 10 minutes from initial boot to serving data through simple application configuration.
• Nondisruptive Operations: Upgrade software or maintain storage during normal working hours with zero downtime.
• Writable Clones: Instantly create writable clones using NetApp Snapshot copy for development testing, reporting, and analysis to accelerate operations.
• Application Integration: Improve efficiency with deep integration between ONTAP and key business applications.

Simplicity

The FAS family has the flexibility to meet growing business needs and meet your changing capacity and performance requirements. Scale up by adding disks or upgrading controllers. Scale out by scaling from 2 nodes to a 24-node cluster with 176PB of capacity. In addition, you can combine different FAS and AFF models to build your environment with next-generation storage using the latest technology.

The FAS family also supports large-scale, easy-to-manage NAS containers. With the NetApp FlexGroup feature of ONTAP 9, a namespace can scale to 20 PB and hold 400 billion files while maintaining consistent high performance and resiliency. By adding and replacing storage systems and components nondisruptively, there are no maintenance windows or downtime to coordinate between teams. You can perform updates during normal business hours.

Integration with the Cloud

FAS systems running ONTAP are optimized for private and hybrid clouds by providing secure multi-tenancy, quality of service, non-stop operations, and easily defined service tiers. In addition, NetApp offers multiple options for extending FAS systems to hybrid clouds with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and other leading cloud providers. Easily move data between on-premises FAS systems and cloud environments using NetApp SnapMirror data replication software.

Optimize storage with intelligent management. You don’t need to be a storage expert to use the broad capabilities of the NetApp storage management portfolio:

• ONTAP System Manager: Simplify and accelerate daily management activities with a modern GUI that gives quick insights into capacity, system health, network connectivity, and performance history.
• NetApp Active IQ Unified Manager: Simplify management of multiple storage clusters. Increase staff efficiency by monitoring petabytes of data from a single dashboard, and receive notifications to quickly resolve issues before they impact data services. Get insights and recommendations on security risks and compliance.
• Predictive Analysis: Use insights and suggestions gained from predictive analysis and collective wisdom to optimize and protect your storage investment. Expose risk factors and prevent problems from affecting business operations.
• NetApp BlueXP: Simplify management of storage and data services on a unified control platform (including FAS systems designed for secondary workloads). Seamlessly manage internal and cloud environments using familiar ONTAP OS tools and workflows. AIops-supported intelligent data infrastructure helps automatically execute workflows, breaking management islands.

Security

Protecting company and customer data in hybrid cloud environments

• ONTAP provides software-based and hardware-based encryption to protect data at rest and in transit between systems.
• With SnapLock, create dedicated volumes to store files in a tamper-proof, non-erasable, non-writable state for a specified retention period or indefinitely.
• Easily and efficiently protect data with autonomous ransomware protection.
• Use multi-factor authentication to secure administrative access.
• Use role-based access control to specify and authenticate authorized users.
• Multi-Administrator Authentication (MAV) ensures that critical actions (e.g., deleting a volume or Snapshot copy) require approval from multiple administrators.
• Use storage-level file security to prevent unauthorized access or deletion of critical intellectual property.
• Meet privacy standards, including GDPR, by cryptographically shredding and sanitizing individual files.