ONTAP is keeping the twice-yearly release cadence by providing spring and fall releases to keep up with the need for new and rapidly developing features. In addition, the cloud versions of ONTAP will use different release numbers. ONTAP 9.9 signifies the cloud release of ONTAP and ONTAP 9.9.1 is the on-prem release.
You can download the latest ONTAP releases here:
https://mysupport.netapp.com/site/products/all/details/ontap9/downloads-tab
So, here’s a brief rundown on what’s new in ONTAP 9.9.1 (copied from the customer communiques that go out). You can also view the Feature Overview TR for ONTAP 9.9.1 here:
https://docs.netapp.com/us-en/ontap-whatsnew/ontap991fo_netapp_ontap.html
Simplified Management
ONTAP System Manager enhanced UI. ONTAP System Manager 9.9.1 supports new ONTAP 9.9.1 capabilities including ASA Cluster expansion, SVM-DR support for FlexGroup volumes, and more. In addition to the new features, NetApp has made many enhancements to address customer feedback, such as improved capacity reporting, support for nested iGroups, UI performance optimizations, and much more.
SnapMirror® Business Continuity (General Availability)
For your SAN workloads, this feature enables flexible, cost-effective, instant failover for your most important business applications such as SAP, Oracle, and more. You have the flexibility to improve TCO by consolidating many different types of workloads onto your ONTAP based systems and then granularly deciding which critical SAN workloads you want supported with the continuous availability of SMBC. SMBC enables applications to fail over to a secondary copy of storage without requiring the application to reconnect to the storage or disrupting the users of that application. It expands your choices across the spectrum of NetApp solutions and partnerships that deliver business continuity, disaster recovery, backup and recovery, and Snapshot™ technology.
New MetroCluster IP enhancements.
Customers can maximize capacity and performance with scalability up to 8-node NetApp MetroCluster IP configurations. Also, ONTAP 9.9.1 RC1 supports routed layer 3 network configuration and up to 1,600 volumes per HA pair.
SnapLock/WORM Compliance
- Storage efficiencies for SnapLock volumes – supports volume data compaction, cross volume or aggregate level deduplication (AFF only), continuous segment cleaning, and Temperature Sensitive Storage Efficiency.
- Ransomware protection support for snapshot copies containing LUNs
FlexGroup Enhancements
- SnapMirror topology (Cascade and Fanout) – replicate a FlexGroup from site A to site B to site C (cascade) or site A to sites B and C (fan-out)
- Storage Virtual Machine Disaster Recovery (SVM-DR) – replicate FlexGroup volumes and SVM configuration (CIFS shares, NFS exports, data LIFs, NFS file handles)
- Logical Space Accounting/Enforcement – Monitor and enforce based on the actual storage used before efficiencies are applied for more accurate chargebacks
All SAN Array Enhancements
- Scalable out ASA clusters. Customers can leverage the power of ONTAP clustering with scale out up to 12 nodes of ASA systems. ASA clusters can include a mix of ASA system types.
- Increase performance with NVMe-OF on ASA systems. With ONTAP 9.9.1 RC1, modernize and accelerate business applications nondisruptively with NVME-oF for ASA systems.
- AFF to ASA in-place conversion. For your mission-critical SAN workloads running Unified AFF, take advantage of ASA benefits such as large LUN support (128TB) and symmetric active-active support with seamless AFF to ASA in-place conversion capability.
- Single LUN performance improvement. With ONTAP 9.9.1 RC1, single LUN performance has been significantly improved compared to previous ONTAP releases. Ideal for simplifying deployments in virtual environments; for example, A800 can provide up to 400% more random read IOPS.
Data Protocol Enhancements
- NFSv4.2 Security Labels (MAC labels) – MAC labels enable granular file access control with SE Linux, above and beyond Unix permissions and NFSv4 ACLs. The benefits provided by this feature include multilevel security for files, simplifying administration of sensitive NAS data in highly secure environments.
- ONTAP S3 object tags for ObjectCreate and MultipartUpload calls – When a HEAD or GET is performed on an object, the user defined metadata and count of the number of tags will be returned as part of the HTTP header in the response. These tags allow you to better categorize your objects within ONTAP buckets for more robust data management and are compatible with applications that require the ability to create metadata and tags.
