June 2016 – ONTAP 9 Month on the Tech ONTAP Podcast!

A couple weeks ago, I hinted at some news that was coming to the Tech ONTAP Podcast in June. Now, that news is finally here – ONTAP 9 has been announced!

We kicked off the month with an interview with Lee Caswell, the VP of Product and Solutions Marketing at NetApp to talk about why NetApp decided to go with the new ONTAP 9 version rather than another 8.x release, as well as how the ONTAP software release cadences are changing.

You can listen to that here:

The entire month is listed under a playlist here:

What changed?

With the new release, there is a focus on the following:

Simplicity

• New AFF deployment templates for Oracle, VDI, SQL to speed up set up (<10 minute set up)
• Improved and re-vamped management GUIs (Dave Morera does a nice job covering this)
• Unified data management across on-prem (flash and disk) and cloud datacenters

Maximizing Data Center Agility

• 4:1 efficiency and 3x performance guarantees
• Ability to run ONTAP on hardware, software defined storage (SDS) or in the cloud
• Improved orchestration for storage with cloud automation, data center orchestration and FlexPod infrastructure automation

Improved Performance

• 20x faster response times
• Up to 60% more IOPs than 8.3.1

There’s also a series of new features being offered in ONTAP 9. We discussed some of those with Lee Caswell (see his blog here), but we will also be covering them in upcoming episodes this month.

For a short list of the new features:

• Support for 15TB SSD
• Inline data compaction
• SnapLock® software for data compliance
• RAID-TEC triple-parity protection
• Headroom for visibility of performance capacity
• MetroCluster enhancements
• Onboard key manager (Included for FREE)
• FlexGroups (PVR only in 9.0)
• Workgroup mode for CIFS/SMB

A few of the NetApp A-Team Members wrote up some blogs for the new stuff:

• Adam Bergh‘s take: http://thepartlycloudyblog.com/ontap9/
• Chris Maki‘s take: http://blog.iops.ca/?p=84
• Dave Morera‘s take: https://greatwhitetec.com/2016/05/31/first-look-at-ontap-9/

Upcoming schedule

The following is the tentative podcast schedule for the rest of the month, where we talk about all things ONTAP 9!

Week of June 3: Lee Caswell on “Why ONTAP 9”; ONTAP 9 overview with a special SolidFire announcement in a mini-podcast! (2.5 podcasts in one week!)
June 10: ONTAP 9 features: Data Protection
June 17: ONTAP 9 features: Flash Perf
June 24: ONTAP 9 features: ONTAP Select and SAN
June 30: ONTAP 9 features: FlexGroups
July 4: ONTAP 9 features: Manageability Tools

Stay tuned for great things!