ONTAP 9.1 RC1 is now available!

For info about ONTAP 9.0, see:

ONTAP 9 RC1 is now available!

ONTAP 9.0 is now generally available (GA)!

While many of the features of ONTAP 9.1 were announced at Insight 2016 in Las Vegas, the official release of the software wasn’t scheduled until the first week of October, which was the week after the conference.

For Insight Las Vegas highlights, see http://www.netapp-insight.com/las-vegas-highlights.

Get used to more features being released for ONTAP in the coming years. We’ve sped up the release cycle to get more cool stuff out faster!

But now, ONTAP 9.1 RC1 available!

That’s right – the next major release of ONTAP is now available. If you have concerns over the “RC” designation, allow me to recap what I mentioned in a previous blog post:

RC versions have completed a rigorous set of internal NetApp tests and are are deemed ready for public consumption. Each release candidate would provide bug fixes that eventually lead up to the GA edition. Keep in mind that all release candidates are fully supported by NetApp, even if there is a GA version available. However, while RC is perfectly fine to run in production environments, GA is the recommended version of any ONTAP software release.

For a more official take on it, see the NetApp link:

http://mysupport.netapp.com/NOW/products/ontap_releasemodel/post70.shtml

What’s new in ONTAP 9.1?

At a high level, ONTAP 9.1 brings:

• Tons of brand new platforms
• NetApp FlexGroup (Generally available!) with Unified Manager and Performance Manager support!
• NetApp Volume Encryption (NVE)
• SnapMirror to AltaVault/cloud
• 12 node SAN clusters
• Native Foreign LUN Import with AFF support (no PVR needed!)
• System Manager improvements (FlexGroup GUI, storage efficiency reporting, new cluster setup workflow)
• SAP HANA support for AFF templates
• Azure support for ONTAP cloud
• Trusted Platform Module
• 32GB FC
• SMB 3.1.1 AES-128-GCM encryption (~1.7 times faster than CCM in ONTAP 9.0!)
• 40GB Ethernet

If you have questions about any of the above, leave a comment and I’ll address them in a future blog post.

Happy upgrading!