I am not going to get into the specifics of Veeam at all here, I want this post to really walk through the process of getting Azure NetApp Files up and running, I will later then share how Veeam can easily protect those NAS workloads that reside here.

I have been keeping a close eye on the Azure NetApp Files story over the last year and this also is linked to the NetApp Cloud Volumes Service over in AWS and GCP offering the same file services in the public cloud without the management overhead of having to managing the storage layer.

Getting Started

Because the cloud is not free, I want to point out there is a cool calculator for all Azure resources that I advise you to and look at before you jump in. The below is specifically aligned to the Azure NetApp Files, choose your region, the storage you wish for the shares to reside on, and how long do you want to see the cost for.

Pricing Calculator

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/pricing/calculator/?service=netapp#netapp2a8e5ab0-07f8-4ebe-bee0-2c4e009a8ea1

for lab purposes I just wanted to see what this would cost, and I thought this is actually quite reasonable.

I had previously stated that my Azure account is restricted as I am locked out of using Azure Active Directory Services. This is my corporate account; I need to think of a way round this but that’s another topic for another day. My use case as also mentioned earlier was to run some testing around Veeam NAS backup and Azure NetApp Files.

Azure NetApp Files allows me to present either SMB or NFS volumes. Both of which can be the source for Veeam NAS backup. Due to the limitation with Azure AD I proceeded with NFS.

Walkthrough

It is really easy to get going, currently ANF is on a locked down beta, I had to approach my friends at NetApp to gain access, but once approved the experience we walk through here will be the same as when we see the GA, firstly log into your Azure portal and search for Azure NetApp Files.

The first requirement is a NetApp Account, if you have not and if this is the first time of using Azure NetApp Files then you will be required to run through the wizard shown here. Select “Create NetApp Account”.

Very simply give your NetApp Account a unique name, select the subscription that will foot the bill, a resource group (my advice is actually to create a specific resource group for your Azure NetApp Files) and then very important is the location, where do you want this to reside.

Click create and it will then start the deployment process.

Once complete you will see the newly created NetApp Account listed under your Azure NetApp Files tab.

If you click into that account you will then get an overview of that created NetApp Account, and within here you can create your capacity pools and volumes.

We must first create a Capacity pool this is your container to where your volumes will be located. Within a Capacity Pool we can have multiple volumes. If you select Capacity Pools you will then see the following screen.

Select “Add Pool” and the creation wizard will appear. Input some details around size and service level requirement.

Once that is created, we need to go back to the Azure NetApp Files Overview page and select volumes. As you can see, we do not have any volumes.

Select “Add Volume” now we have a more advanced wizard to walk through. On the first screen we must configure a name, which capacity pool this volume will reside in, a quota against the volume and then a unique network. (again, my advice here so far has been to go and pre create or use the create new option here)

Then we must choose the protocol we wish to use, for my configuration I needed to use NFS, and NFS v3 and I left the default export policy on who can access this share. If in production you should be thinking about what has access and not at this screen, although this can be changed later on.

We also could assign tags to our resources in Azure, this allows for better management within large environments.

Review your configuration and create your first Azure NetApp Files volume.

One of my favourite things from Microsoft in Azure is the fact that I can download a template for automation tasks later on. I have run through the UI for this particular task but if I wanted to automate this process later on or potentially repeat this across different regions I could take this JSON output and use that over and over again to get the same configuration over and over again. This is a beautiful thing especially when you are getting into the world of Infrastructure as Code.

When you hit complete, its then going to start the creation of your volume.

It really will not take too long at all. Once complete you will be notified, or you will see the below.

Now we can view the overview of the volume, this screen is where we can see the usage of the volume, obviously right now we have not mounted the volume or put any data on it.

Another cool feature of Azure NetApp Files is the walkthrough for presenting the NFS volume to your system.

At this stage because you must have a dedicated virtual network for the Azure NetApp Files you will need to peer your virtual networks together to consume. Then you can run through the mounting as per above.

Another thing I have been really impressed with is the Azure documentation.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-netapp-files/azure-netapp-files-quickstart-set-up-account-create-volumes?tabs=azure-portal

Last year I spoke about their Spring Launch around a month earlier. That release saw updates focused on ONTAP 9.4, Security, FabricPool and FlexGroups. Here is a link to that post from last year.

This year I wanted to summarise some of the cool and important announcements NetApp have made this week.

It was around 5 years ago now that we heard the term “NetApp Data Fabric” but at the time it was mostly vision rather than an accountable option of being able to move data to and from multiple different locations regardless of the underlining technology it would be handled by the same control platform. Fast forward those 5 years and that “NetApp Data Fabric” vision is now well and truly a thing and can be consumed today.

NetApp Cloud Data Services was in my opinion the missing piece to the Data Fabric vision and this is not new it’s a real thing today.

A quote to back this up this morning was “For example, the NetApp Kubernetes Service (NKS), has over 19 THOUSAND clusters deployed as of this morning.”

Let’s get into some of these announcements.

StorageGRID

For any readers of my blog you will have seen two new posts over the last month touching at a high level some of the exciting things I think StorageGRID brings to the Object Storage world.

I am personally seeing a huge increase in conversations about on premises object storage options and this to me as some great differentiators that I touch on in those blogs.

Why NetApp StorageGRID

What is NetApp StorageGRID

The image below highlights the options and flexibility you have with NetApp StorageGRID and where and what you are able to run their Software Defined Object Storage Software on and where.

What’s new – StorageGRID tiering to AWS Glacier, Seamless integration with policy engine enables users to store and restore objects to/from AWS Glacier storage.

This means that using the ILM (mentioned in both of the posts linked above) has the ability to use the policy engine to move data to outside of the StorageGRID platform but still allow StorageGRID and the ILM to have access to that data.

This also enables customers to tier their data from possible on premises more expensive storage now into AWS Glacier.

As well as the above there has also been a focus around security introducing multi form factor authentication.

Cloud Volumes ONTAP

A quick 101 what is it? It is NetApp ONTAP software running in a cloud VM, managing native Public Cloud storage, it is licensed two ways either Pay-as-you-go or BYOL and is managed through a SaaS console with Cloud Central.

Cloud Volumes ONTAP prior today is available within AWS and Microsoft Azure, with the spring launch this has now been extended to Google Cloud as well.

The exciting thing about this and it was exciting before is now I can have on premises ONTAP and any or all of these Cloud Volumes ONTAP and providing I have the networking between in place I can transfer my data between and leverage those different public clouds for different scenarios against that data. Also add this into ONTAP Select which is ONTAP that can be ran as a virtual machine as a complete software defined storage option in any smaller ROBO type locations it’s a great option.

Fabric Orchestrator

Ok, we just touched on one of hurdles that NetApp didn’t have but have increasingly added over the last few years in terms of being able to run their ONTAP Operating System wherever, then leverage the ability to use their SnapMirror to replicate data between those systems.

The next challenge and this is what I will try and cover briefly in this section was now we could have all these different assets in all these different locations, the biggest challenge then becomes how do I manage it?

To me this is actually the missing puzzle piece that NetApp have needed for a while! I would also add connectivity to that same list, but this was the main problem to fix over the last few years especially when we saw Cloud Volumes ONTAP released.

Ok I will stop babbling now, what is Fabric Orchestrator?

“A centralised data control plane to discover, manage, control and govern your data estate, no matter where it is.”

I think in that one sentence that summarises what this is and this topic probably deserves its own post to get deeper into the weeds.

It’s not just Cloud Volumes ONTAP or just ONTAP systems even. The following options are also available to manage and control through Fabric Orchestrator.

• Cloud Volumes Service
  
• Azure NetApp Files
  
• Cloud Volumes ONTAP
  
• Cloud Volumes On-Premises
  
• Cloud Volumes on HCI
  

You can find out more information about everything here that was included in the launch event.

I have been preaching the powers of NetApp & Veeam for a few years now, but if you have not seen the power of the integration between the two vendors then I am going to summarise everything in this post here today.

Explorer

Let’s start with the free stuff you can do with Veeam in a NetApp ONTAP environment. Veeam Community Edition (Free version of Veeam) has the ability to add an ONTAP controller to your Veeam environment and regardless of if Veeam has created those native ONTAP snapshots or not, Veeam has the ability to go inside those ONTAP snapshots and perform recoveries against any VMware virtual machine you have within that snapshot. This could be full virtual machine recovery, also Instant VM recovery see here. It could also be file level recovery or if you want to get down to the application items, maybe a mail item or share point object then you can also do this from the FREE version!

Orchestrate

Now natively you can create a NetApp Snapshot pretty stress free, however this is going to be crash consistent and where some application servers would withstand that crash consistency on recovery there are some most likely business critical applications that require application consistency. Why not use Veeam to orchestrate your application aware and application consistent snapshots. This provides a much tighter Recovery Point Objective. This also makes leveraging ONTAP snapshots for these reasons more appealing given that in ONTAP 9.4 the limit of snapshots per volume was increased from 255 to 100. With it being a snapshot your Recovery Time Objective is going to be seconds!

Veeam can also orchestrate the SnapMirror or SnapVault snapshot data transfer.

Backup

Ok sounds good so far. Now the icing on the cake or maybe the buttercream in the middle of the cake. Snapshots are great and I am not getting into the snapshot vs backup its 2019 and if you don’t get it or agree then you probably voted BREXIT and I am fine with that, but this is my time to shine not yours.

The integration with Veeam and NetApp gives us the ability to leverage those snapshots and gain all the benefits mentioned in the above section but also the ability to get those blocks of data into another media type.

OnDemand

We have you covered for granular recovery, fast RTO, tighter RPO and a copy of your data on a separate media type that could protect you from internal malicious threats or corruption. Now the cherry on top.

We can take those ONTAP Snapshots and those backups and we can spin them up in an isolated environment. Veeam DataLabs gives us the ability to leverage the FlexClone technology on the ONTAP system and automate the creation, provisioning and removal of small isolated sandbox environments. This YouTube video clip of a session I did is a little old now, but the capability is a huge feature within Veeam Backup & Replication.

Oh, I should also mention that we have the same integration with Element Software and NetApp HCI I wrote about that here.

I think that’s all for now in the world of NetApp & Veeam. If you have any questions, then you can find me on the twitters @MichaelCade1

First, I must introduce NetApp ONTAP Select a Software Defined Storage play allowing for ONTAP to be leveraged on commodity hardware and not requiring FAS hardware. Before Select, NetApp had released a product called ONTAP Edge a similar use case but limited to VMware.  

Edge was great for me from a test and development point of view, I didn’t have the power or budget to be able to run a full blown FAS in my home lab, so Edge gave me that possibility rather than relying on what has become a flaky at best ONTAP simulator. The biggest let down though was it was only available for vSphere as an OVA format appliance. More to come on this later.  

This is not a release post in fact ONTAP Select has been round for some time, maybe 3 years. But I think now is the time it should be taken seriously in the world of Software-Defined Storage but also how it interacts with the whole NetApp Data Fabric.  

Back to ONTAP Select, the key benefits to this new SDS platform are the following:  

Flexibility and Agile – the ability to deploy “Cloud Like” storage on commodity server infrastructure. To be able to deploy, expand and procure in a very fast and efficient way.  

Enterprise Availability – Ultimately this solution is running ONTAP this means all the rich management features and tools are also baked into this product. Something that ONTAP Edge didn’t have and was lacking was the ability to provide high availability across multiple ONTAP Select nodes. More on this later also.  

Efficient and Effective Protection – As I said previously this is using the ONTAP system so all the Snapshot, SnapMirror and SnapVault technologies are also available here, but also the storage efficiencies are also ported over meaning space savings on commodity hardware.  

High Availability  

High availability is obviously important even in the Software Defined Storage space. ONTAP Select is supported in 1,2,3,4,6 and 8 node configurations. Obviously, there is little HA in the 1 node cluster. Let’s do the maths quickly there so 400TB RAW for each node, means we can get up to 3.2PB in a single cluster.  

A FlexGroup could be used to merge all useable capacity into a single name space.  

What we have here is a Software Defined Storage, Scale out solution with the same namespace across all four nodes. And with all the same benefits around non-disruptive operations. As with ONTAP we have the ability to still move workloads Non-disruptively between these nodes as well as rebalance that workload.  

This solution today is scalable to 400TB RAW, but with all the benefits of storage efficiency around Thin Provisioning, deduplication and compression this makes for a great option on some of the following scenarios I am going to mention later.  

It’s also worth mentioning that this will allow for a unified storage offering File level services in NFS and SMB as well as block with the iSCSI protocol.  

Scenarios  

Test & Development  

Given the hardware requirements this scenario makes for a great use case for a Test and Development use case, the ability to send production volume data to an ONTAP Select node and then be able to use that in a development environment allowing developers to run against the ONTAP capabilities, obviously the downside here the ONTAP Select platform may not be as performant as the production FAS system but still there is a great number use cases within this scenario where this could really drive development within an enterprise business.  

Tier 2 / 3 primary workloads 

Because this is commodity hardware there is no real limitation on what hardware can be used (when I say this, I mean regarding the disk spindles or SSD that are used within the hardware) this means you are able to appropriately tier your production storage to leverage this easily adaptable platform as part of the enterprise storage solution.  

DR / Offsite Secondary storage  

Why do you need a like for like storage solution in your disaster recovery location when you can fill out some commodity hardware with disk and then have ONTAP Select on top accepting all SnapMirrored data appropriately? But also think for longer term retention and SnapVault, for longer retention possibly compliance rulings you can use this commodity hardware and storage rather than a full enterprise array for such retention. Surely cutting costs but still retaining the fabric enabling the transfer of data between sites and locations. I am going to get into this one in some more detail in another post.  

Service Providers  

The above scenario I mention is purely for private clouds, what about leveraging that same technology in a Service Provider environment and allow for Backup As A Service or even DR As A Service using ONTAP Select, this is going to be possible with all the built in isolation and multi tenancy capabilities of ONTAP 9.  

Technical Requirements & Specification 

The final thing I am going to touch on in this post is the NetApp ONTAP Select technical requirements. 

To find out more visit NetApp.com and also for a free 90 day trial.  

Functionality is covered in the post linked above, I wanted to take this time to highlight the simple process of getting your NetApp HCI or SolidFire storage added within your Veeam Backup & Replication console.

Before you begin you need to make sure you have added your vSphere environment this will unlock the Storage Infrastructure tab.

This week some of my posts are focusing on Veeam Community Edition, I will be running through the process of adding storage within this free edition, this allows even the community edition to have visibility and some control in to some of your historic snapshots that were not even created by Veeam, as well as the ability to recover some items from those snapshots.

As you can see from the above, we have a clean Veeam Backup & Replication install with our VMware environment added but in the shot above you see we have no storage integrations currently added to our Veeam Backup & Replication console. To add we need to select the Add Storage.

Next up you will see the long list of available storage integrations that are available along with the link to download any of the additional Universal Storage API plug ins. For us we can select the NetApp option below.

On this next page you will see Data ONTAP which we have covered a few times in previous posts, but the one we are interested in today is Element, Element is the operating system that is used on both SolidFire and NetApp HCI storage.

The element option is a link to the Veeam website where all plug ins can be downloaded. Authenticate with your account or create an account to see those available downloads.

Scroll down until you find the following screen, this is applicable for all Veeam Universal Storage integrations, here you will find the downloads for all.

Select and download the NetApp Element Plug-In.

The plug-in once downloaded will be in the form of a compressed file, extract this into an appropriate location.

You will see once extracted, it is an application file type that can then be ran, I always choose to run as administrator.

If you have not closed down all your Veeam Backup & Replication consoles then you will first of all get the following warning which will not let you proceed until all consoles are closed.

Next is a pretty straight forward wizard, its Veeam we wouldn’t make this complicated would we. Next.

Terms of usage, let’s make sure we all spend our time and read through this. It after all states in block capitals that this is IMPORTANT – READ CAREFULLY.

When you are happy with the terms of usage, your tray table is stowed, your seat in an upright position and your seat belt fastened you can proceed with the installation.

A note to mention is that this is going to stop some Veeam services, as a best practice you should disable your jobs before running the installation. Don’t worry it does start them again once installed. Just remember to re-enable the jobs after. In my lab I have no jobs running currently and it doesn’t take long at all.

Ok so that’s the plug-in installed on your Veeam Backup & Replication server. Pretty simple straight forward stuff.

Now let’s head back into our Veeam Backup & Replication console and we can add our NetApp HCI / SolidFire system. Follow the first four steps of the post above to get back to this stage, but this time we know we have the software downloaded and installed. First up add in your management IP of your system.

Provide the credentials to access the storage system.

The next options are around protocols available, volumes to be scanned and which of our proxies should we use or that have access to the storage array.

Volumes to scan, if you have volumes other than VMFS datastores for your VMware environment you may wish to remove them from the scanning schedule here.

Backup Proxies to use, this ensures that only certain proxies that have the capability of accessing the storage system are used. By default, all proxies will be used or attempted.

That’s it, confirm the summary of the system you are adding, once hitting finished here. Veeam is going to run a scan against the volumes for VMware VM files.

The next screen / pop up is now discovering the storage system. It’s going to scan for all VMFS volumes located on the storage array.

Another Veeam server has been orchestrating snapshots but with this instance of Veeam Backup & Replication we have the ability to look inside of those volumes and snapshots and see the VMs available for recovery options. We can also perform a level of restore against those.

I will follow up in another post what else we can do now we have our NetApp HCI system visible to our Veeam Backup & Replication server. Yes, we can backup from it and restore but there are also some more very interesting features that we can take advantage of including Veeam DataLabs.

This Insight was a special one for me as it marked the 5-year anniversary of becoming a member of the NetApp A Team. I have been working with NetApp technologies for the most part of my career, probably around 11 years or so now, I wrote this last year to mark the 10 years at the ONTAP end.

Back to the A Team, when the program first started there was a small number of us advocating by way of blogging and just being visible on social media and sticking up for the NetApp technology portfolio.

Here is another post marking the 4 year anniversary for the A Team.

So, what did I get up to this year in the new compressed 3-day event,

General Session Interview

As part of the 5-team crew we were asked to be on the super early shift and take part in the general session as everyone was taking their seats.

I cannot find any video footage of the interviews we did though just yet. But it was great to be involved with the guys and continuing to highlight what the A Team is and about.

From left to right:

Sean Luce (@seanluce) Ryan Beaty (@rnbeaty) Chris Maki (@ChrisMaki) Michael Cade (@MichaelCade1) Adam Bergh (@ajbergh)

It was awesome to have my good friend and fellow Veeamer Adam, ask me what I was excited for and what it means to be a year member of the NetApp A Team

Breakout Sessions

Me and Adam also had a couple of breakout sessions, we covered the Veeam integration points with ONTAP and NetApp HCI, still amazed the amount of people that were not aware that we did this, must remember this and keep the story going. Our second session was about Advanced Architectures and we touched on a lot of the public cloud offerings from Veeam.

If you are heading to Barcelona, then me and Adam will be repeating these sessions over there.

Hanging out with these smart people

Introducing the 2018 NetApp A Team group photo. Really enjoyed hanging out with these guys, there just wasn’t enough days of conference to get to know the new folks better.

For those that know me, they know I love a bit of swag, check out those new A Team polo as well they were awesome. Thanks Mom.

On the first evening we had our A Team reception and the 5-year guys were presented with a gift. It’s an awesome jacket top with 5 year on the arm. I will need that in Barcelona the first week of December, but we also got presented with them from the NetApp Legend himself Tom Mendoza.

I know myself, Adam and Chris will be in Barcelona. Check out our breakout sessions, if you see us just stop us to have a chat.

Moving on now to Cloud Insights, this new offering from NetApp is much more welcome because I believe this will open the door to similar capabilities mentioned above but at a much more affordable price.

“Innovate faster with insights across your application infrastructure stack”

Why Cloud Insights

We don’t just have a virtual environment anymore running in our shared or owned datacentre, we are leveraging public cloud, we are leveraging all types of new modern technologies such as containers. Generally speaking there would be one tool for on premises and others for public cloud and other areas of the businesses. There is nothing from top to bottom that can capture insight from these assets in one place.

Currently at a tech preview stage with general availability to happen later in the year.

In the same fashion as OnCommand Insight the three key goals and areas that this will help are:

• Reduce MTTR
• Reduce cloud infrastructure costs
• Prevent issues

Cloud Insights is a SaaS based offering meaning that there is no requirement to build out a huge dedicated environment which is the case with OnCommand Insight.

Editions

The interesting part with the available editions is if you are an existing NetApp storage customer, not just ONTAP but all platforms available. You will be able to take advantage of that free edition and just look at some of the key features that are available in each of those editions. I think this now can really help with those customers that are priced out of the opportunity with OnCommand Insight.

Data Collectors for third parties

One of the things that I am really interested in is the third-party collectors and how this could be leveraged by the ecosystem to generate the ability to push data into this platform to gain insight on other areas of the environment. This is the latest set of collectors available within Cloud Insights today with more planned to be added in the future.

I encourage everyone to look back through the SFD16 sessions from NetApp, there are some great demos and further conversation around Cloud Insights as well as the previous product covered with OnCommand Insight.

I expect to see a lot more of this in the lead up and when we get to NetApp Insight in Las Vegas mid to end October.

Coming from a NetApp background I have been very impressed by NetApp OnCommand Insight as a product throughout the years, yet the frustrating thing was how all of that information and data was only available at an absolute premium to the top companies or largest enterprise customers around the world. This made or makes me sad. The “insight” see what I did there that this tool can gather is AMAZING! It’s not limited to only NetApp storage it can gather information about pretty much all storage systems in a given environment. Along with host data from vSphere and other hypervisors, network information from switches and also fibre channel fabrics. It’s a really impressive bit of kit.

Why OCI

“Drive data insights for intelligent operations and informed decisions”

The following WHYs are pretty generic to every monitoring and reporting tool but stick with me on this.

• Increase customer satisfaction – if you are a service provider or enterprise the satisfaction of the service delivered is always a high priority.
• Reduced MTTR (Mean time to recovery) – everyone wants to speed up that recovery process.
• Lower Costs – now who doesn’t want to lower costs…
• More business alignment – I think they mean by having visibility they can make sure all areas of the business are going in the same direction and things can be more efficient.

What does OCI do

• Monitoring – Centralise monitoring across your growing Hybrid IT Infrastructure
• Troubleshooting – Fix problems faster with end to end analytics
• Cost control and Optimisation – Reduce cost across you Hybrid Environment
• Chargeback & Show back reporting – Aligned business with IT
• Ecosystem integration – Break down technology silos

What OCI discovers

Now this is the bit that interests me, the ability to gain insights across the hybrid environment stack.

Why OCI is different

Most other tools would require an agent to reach these large-scale environments and be able to report on all elements of the stack. This is not the case with OnCommand Insight there are no agents but still the ability to provide massive scale regardless of where the endpoint is placed. I mentioned before also how this is not just a storage insight tool it can monitor the whole environment stack including networking, hypervisor, VM and in most cases also the application layer. Probably one of the most powerful features of this product is that now you have the visibility into your whole environment you can now start to put a price on those resources and have visibility into areas that are not being used or underutilised giving a better way of optimising your investments.

Monitoring

The absolute goal for any monitoring software vendor is to discover issues before end user are affected.

OCI can help discover and monitor the entire hybrid infrastructure as I mentioned above, this gives you the visibility into latency, traffic, errors, saturation and availability whilst also giving you the ability to customise alerts for given objects within the environment.

Troubleshooting

As well as monitoring we want to be able to fix problems faster, the fact that OCI brings this end to end analytics means the goal in helping return the operational state back as fast as possible. The ability to see metal to app service path and take those metrics for analysis to identify correlated resources, if an application is taking up more resource than it should or if the performance of an application server is degraded, all this with also the ability to detect anomalies within the environment and alert on them.

Cost Control & Optimisation

We are seeing a lot of effort in the industry around being able to do more with what you have, being able to leverage data to do more and gain more insight being able to squeeze more out of those CAPEX purchases, but also by being the most efficient when performing these tasks, the do more with less springs to mind. What OCI can do here is give the insight into what those operational costs look like, provide trends on say the storage being consumed and how much that totals from a financial point of view. OCI can help by providing:

• Right Sizing
• Density and elasticity
• Purchase models and capacity planning

Chargeback and Show back reports

The cost control then leads to the chargeback or show back models, how can you actually take that insight and report back what is being utilised and break down those infrastructure usage models. As a service provider or an enterprise wanting to act like a service provider the ability to see which resources are being used and then to create those reports. This isn’t too dissimilar to other reporting offerings that can do the same, where this does get interesting is how this data can then be fed into a billing system.

Ecosystem Integration

We are in a world where we want to see everything in one place, or maybe we have always been there but now there is a chance we can get a lot closer. OCI’s REST API will allow you to integrate your surrounding infrastructure with IT and business process. This can enable further automation, billing, capacity planning and management, support ticketing.

I am excited by some of the features that come with OnCommand Insight but I am still not convinced this is being opened up to the masses, but following on from this we will see some news on a new product from NetApp called Cloud Insights.

I think it’s fair to say NetApp have really pulled things back in the industry. Maybe they did lose their way and maybe they grew too fast for a period. But the main man Kurian seems to have steered things in the right direction from a business perspective and the tech is I believe in front of the curve.

This week you are going to see announcements from NetApp this is going to range from some significant updates when it comes to ONTAP 9.4, Security, FabricPool and FlexGroups. Oh, and those platforms. Yep this software must run on some hardware, well if you wish too.

I want this post to be an overview post for the other announcements and personally I want to call out some of those milestone features that will arrive with ONTAP 9.4.

Snapshots

Was a limit of 255 snapshots ever an issue…? I only came up against a few enterprise clients where it did, but they were some of the biggest organisations in the world and their use case was some of the most frequent snapshots and retention for really fast recovery.

Now I don’t want to turn this post into a Snapshots vs backup, we all know my feelings on this and it’s a snapshots and backups argument. But these large enterprises were also Veeam customers and they would use Veeam to trigger those application or crash consistent snapshots on a retention as well as leverage those snapshots for a backup to a different media type. The limitation they faced was the 255 snapshots per volume as it meant they could not keep minute-based snapshots for a long period of time. Now with the latest release of ONTAP this is going to increase things by over four times to 1023 snapshots.

ONTAP image installation

Hands up if you are a field installation engineer, or you have faced the task of getting to site and you must download the update image but then you have to setup your own network including web server to get your storage updated, now I cannot complain this method out of hours and some others went toward paying for our wedding. However, …

It might only be a minor thing to the most, but this is massive for those engineers and admin. To be able to update your version of ONTAP via OnCommand System Manager from your laptop is a great thing.

Platform

I will probably come back and have a complete post touching on the platform, and by platform we are talking that physical hardware offering. I am sure someone still gets excited by the hardware side of things.

We will see a new high end as well as entry level all flash FAS and a new entry FAS, 100Gbe and 25GbE networking capabilities. More NVMe over fabric and SSD and 30TB SAS attached SSD.

FlexGroup

Lots of new features and enhancements around Quality of Service and extending current support. I touched on the benefits of FlexGroups when they first came out here.

https://vzilla.co.uk/vzilla-blog/im-bringing-flexy-back-netapp-flexgroup

FlashPool

FlashPool as a feature was released a few versions ago and this update of ONTAP sees some significant enhancements.

Again, like the other pieces I could go into more detail in a separate post. But for the record FlashPool excites me because it changes the barriers, no longer is about keeping data siloed in a datacenter, also it doesn’t have to start with the datacenter with this release support for Cloud ONTAP and ONTAP Select bringing a cloud based or software defined way of tiering into cloud-based storage.

Full disclosure, I am a member of the NetAppATeam and I have attended forum calls and will be attending this week future briefings.

This morning on the final day of NetApp Insight 2017 in Las Vegas, it was announced in the General Session that Veeam would be added to the NetApp global price list. Here is the executive blog from Veeam – https://www.veeam.com/executive-blog/direct-integration-with-netapp-ontap.html

From my point of view being a bit of a NetApp fanboi this is pretty special, we have some pretty deep integration with NetApp ONTAP systems today already but now to bundle Veeam licensing with any ONTAP solution and allowing NetApp sales and partners to easily order this bundle from one location.

It’s not just about that integration though, we still have some other sticky areas of the NetApp portfolio such as NetApp E-series, AltaVault, SolidFire and the upcoming NetApp HCI release. We have the ability to use these platforms as backup targets as well as being able to protect data from them when they are used as production storage.

When will this happen? That I do not know, but I am sure if you are a NetApp partner today then be sure to have that conversation with your NetApp account team. For more information though on the integrations then drop by the Veeam booth on this final day of Insight.

It has been a strange week but I want to say it again, thanks to all the staff of the Mandalay Bay, the local law and security that kept me safe on Sunday evening. I also want to thank the #NetAppATeam I have known some of these guys for 5 years and consider them friends. That’s how we got through Sunday because we are a team. Safe travels all, when you get back give your loved ones that extra hug.