What’s been announced?
AI Updates
⭐️ NetApp AIPod
⭐️ NetApp FlexPod AI
⭐️ Amazon FSx Updates
Ransomware Resiliency Updates
⭐️ Autonomous Ransomware Protection
⭐️ BlueXP Ransomware Protection
⭐️ SnapCenter 5.0 Cyber Resiliency
⭐️ Improved Cyber Resilience in Azure NetApp Files (ANF)
⭐️ Ransomware Recovery Guarantee for Keystone
Other Updates
⭐️ BlueXP Disaster Recovery now GA
⭐️ StorageGRID 11.8 Update
AI Updates
Although NetApp doesn’t offer any AI software, they can help you maximize the potential of AI through their NetApp AIPod, an intelligent data infrastructure which allows you to optimize your data pipeline and remove AI infrastructure obstacles, and provide efficient data collection, accelerated AI workloads, and smoother cloud integration.
NetApp AIPod is one of the first converged infrastructure stacks to incorporate NVIDIA DGX H100, the world’s first 5-petaflop AI system, and NVIDIA Mellanox® high-performance Ethernet switches. You get unified AI workloads, simplified deployment, and fast return on investment.
- Optimized data provisioning, efficient data cloning, and optimized hybrid multi-cloud.
- High-performance all-flash storage to accelerate performance and eliminate data and application silos.
- Built-in cybersecurity protection with model traceability and sensitive data detection.
NetApp is extending their leading converged infrastructure solution to support several new FlexPod AI architectures. New scaling and benchmarking have been added to support increasingly GPU Intensive Applications. FlexPod for AI supports the NVIDIA AI Enterprise (NVAIE) software platform including support for Red Hat OpenShift and Suse Rancher.
These reference architecture solutions are designed for AI use cases which reduce complexity, leverage Ansible automation to save time and reduce risk, and are a secure by-design, zero-trust solution, making FlexPod AI the gold standard in platform validation for AI uses cases.
NetApp has doubled the performance of Amazon FSx for GenAI workloads and is now validated with Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker, making it perfect for processing and analysing large volumes of AI data. This ultimately means faster utilisation of retrieval augmented generation (RAG) to securely blend proprietary data with public models.
Note: Amazon FSx seamlessly scales-out to 12 HAS pairs of file servers with a 1 petabyte-scale namespace.
Cyber Resiliency Updates
NetApp has been helping customers to protect against cyberattacks since 2021 with their ML-based autonomous ransomware protection built in to ONTAP for their all-flash and hybrid storage offerings.
NetApp's portfolio of intelligent data services continues to grow, leading the industry in ransomware protection. Today, NetApp announced their newest generation of real-time AI-powered ransomware detection.
Embedded into their enterprise storage arrays, autonomous ransomware protection is the first AI-powered ransomware detection for enterprise storage. By using AIOps to deliver greater than 99% precision and recall, NetApp’s autonomous ransomware protection can detect more sophisticated and evolving cyber threats, and when used in a “protect, detect and repair” methodology alongside immutable snapshots, SnapCenter 5.0 (see below), and NetApp's BlueXP ransomware protection data service (see below), you’ll always have the best protection against ransomware.
Note: NetApp aims to release a technology preview of this capability to select customers in the next quarter.
BlueXP ransomware protection is a new optional workload-centric service from NetApp that pulls together all the different ransomware features and consolidates all the alerts across your NetApp estate into a unified control plane. Through intelligent orchestration, BlueXP ransomware protection will recommend and apply protection policies at the storage layer to protect your data from ransomware attacks.
Product Highlights:
- Automatically identifies and analyses workloads at risk
- Recommends and applies protection policies
- Uses ML to detect potential attacks in near real-time
- Automatically responds when an attack is suspected
- Validates backup integrity and rapidly recovers workloads
SnapCenter is a simplified backup, restore, and clone management system for disparate applications, databases, and file systems under a single tool. SnapCenter integrates with cloud and 1st party services such as ANF to provide backup, restore, and cloning operations across on-prem, hybrid and public cloud environments.
SnapCenter 5.0 brings several key benefits around app-aware ransomware protection including:
- SnapLock and Snapshot copy locking: ensures snapshots are tamper-proof and can't be deleted or changed by attackers.
- SnapMirror Business Continuity: enable more robust data protection for applications and virtual machines.
- Data protection for apps in the cloud: extend protection into first-party services (AWS, Azure).
- Tag-based protection: accelerate and simplify backup management in complex environments, especially those with many virtual machines.
- Linux files systems: safeguard critical Linux data using the robust capabilities of SnapCenter.
Cyber security in the public cloud is just as important as securing your on-prem workloads. NetApp have also announced some enhancements to Microsoft Azure NetApp Files.
Keystone is NetApp’s single subscription, pay-as-you-grow storage-as-a-service offering for hybrid cloud data service. With Keystone you can now enjoy the same ransomware recovery guarantee that applies to AFF and FAS systems where NetApp will guarantee they will be able to recover your protected NetApp Snapshot copies, and if they can't they will compensate you organisation.
Note: Users must also purchase the Ransomware Recovery Assurance Service to qualify for the guarantee. Terms and conditions apply.
BlueXP Disaster Recovery Now GA
BlueXP Features Overview:
- Simplified deployment, protection, and administration
- Lower cost without the need for a full capacity secondary data center
- Less disruption with a consistent VMware environment at recovery target if disaster strikes - same rebooks, same processes
- Higher confidence of successful recovery from failure
- Hager performance with proven SnapMirror technology
StorageGRID Updates
StorageGRID 11.8 - brings enhancements around security, manageability and simplicity to further improve usability, information lifecycle management, and configuration with improved mixed nodes functionality that allows to mix SSD and HDD node in a single site.
In Summary
- Data management simplicity
- Highest performing data
- Trusted secure data
- NVIDIA-certified, AI turnkey solutions
- Automated ransomware protection and recovery guarantees
- Partnering with the world's largest clouds to enhance customer protection
- Streamlining protection from disaster with lower cost and burden than alternatives
Author
David Brown - Softcat Solutions Architect and member of the NetApp A-Team