NetApp ONTAP 9 unifies data management across flash, disk, and cloud to simplify your storage environment. It bridges current enterprise workloads and new emerging applications. It builds the foundation for a Data Fabric, making it easy to move your data where it is needed across flash, disk, and cloud resources.
In this blog I will give you the technical breakdown of all the new enhancements in ONTAP 9.6.
In this blog I will give you the technical breakdown of all the new enhancements in ONTAP 9.6.
Key Themes
ONTAP 9.5 has been out for 6 months and came with a slew of new features that helped customers to enable higher performance and better resiliency than previous releases.
In ONTAP 9.6, NetApp improves on ease of use, security and data protection, as well on the capabilities around extending the storage stack beyond on-premises and into the cloud.
In ONTAP 9.6, NetApp improves on ease of use, security and data protection, as well on the capabilities around extending the storage stack beyond on-premises and into the cloud.
- Simplification focused on IT generalist use of ONTAP and ONTAP systems
- Greater operational efficiency, data protection and security for hybrid cloud deployments
- Continuing to deliver NetApp’s vision for modern SAN
What’s New In and With ONTAP 9.6
ONTAP 9 Release Support Policy
One of the biggest bug bears with previous ONTAP releases was the limited support for even releases, which often deterred customer adoption to them. Starting with ONTAP 9.6, all releases will now have Long Term Service (LTS) support. This means that every future release from ONTAP 9.6 onwards will now have 3 years Full Support, plus 2 years of Limited Support.
Upgrade Path to ONTAP 9.6
To upgrade to ONTAP 9.6, you’ll need to perform an Automated Non-disruptive Upgrade (ANDU) to ONTAP 9.5 first. In the future, NetApp is seriously looking to allow upgrades directly to a new release from any release, which to significantly simplify the upgrade process.
ONTAP Management Update
So let’s take look at the management improvements that ONTAP 9.6 brings.
First off, NetApp is renaming the primary tool for managing a cluster from OnCommand System Manager to ONTAP System Manager. This is part of NetApp’s strategic direction to simplify the management of ONTAP systems.
Based on REST APIs, ONTAP System Manager has redesigned page views and simpler workflows optimised for use by IT generalists, including new visualisations of network topology and storage hardware, and intelligent capacity reporting of on-premises and cloud usage at a glance.
The dashboard is much improved with more information visible on a single page including new visualisations of the nodes, with any failed drives, as well as network topology, performance and intelligent capacity information of both on-premises and cloud.
The most significant enhancement to System Manager are the REST APIs, a smaller set of simpler to use APIs than zAPIs, which will be usable by Python and PowerShell, with an SDK to follow shortly.
There are also some major workflows optimisations, with less clicks to view things like overall capacity, recent performance and protocol settings.
To upgrade to ONTAP 9.6, you’ll need to perform an Automated Non-disruptive Upgrade (ANDU) to ONTAP 9.5 first. In the future, NetApp is seriously looking to allow upgrades directly to a new release from any release, which to significantly simplify the upgrade process.
ONTAP Management Update
So let’s take look at the management improvements that ONTAP 9.6 brings.
First off, NetApp is renaming the primary tool for managing a cluster from OnCommand System Manager to ONTAP System Manager. This is part of NetApp’s strategic direction to simplify the management of ONTAP systems.
Based on REST APIs, ONTAP System Manager has redesigned page views and simpler workflows optimised for use by IT generalists, including new visualisations of network topology and storage hardware, and intelligent capacity reporting of on-premises and cloud usage at a glance.
The dashboard is much improved with more information visible on a single page including new visualisations of the nodes, with any failed drives, as well as network topology, performance and intelligent capacity information of both on-premises and cloud.
The most significant enhancement to System Manager are the REST APIs, a smaller set of simpler to use APIs than zAPIs, which will be usable by Python and PowerShell, with an SDK to follow shortly.
There are also some major workflows optimisations, with less clicks to view things like overall capacity, recent performance and protocol settings.
Here are a few old and new dashboard comparisons side by side.
Dashboard
Dashboard
Volumes Page
Volume Detail
Network Ports List
Another pretty cool feature is the ability to auto-discover ONTAP nodes and deploy a cluster from start to finish without installing anything, so as an example you could deploy a new cluster from an iPAD.
For more extensive management of multiple clusters and sites, Active IQ Unified Manager is also available.
Feature Enhancements
NVMe/FC - Possibly the biggest enhancement in ONTAP 9.6 is the expanded ecosystem support for NVMe/FC with Host OS support with storage path failover (ANA) for:
- VMware ESXi 7.0
- Windows 2012/2016
- Oracle Linux
FabricPool – ONTAP 9.6 provides new public cloud offerings from Google Cloud Storage and Alibaba Cloud Object Storage Service giving more choice and multi-regional support.
There's a new tiering policy that tiers all user blocks immediately to the cloud which is great for data already cold, and improved cold data reporting in System Manager.
Also the removal of the 1:20 ration gives improved aggregate efficiency compared with ONTAP 9.5, and 1 and 3 year subscription license terms provides more flexibility and enables OPEX accounting.
Furthermore, FabricPools in ONTAP 9.6 provides SVM-DR support for fast recovery of FabricPool volumes post-disaster, and FabricPool volumes on the performance tier can now be moved without impacting cloud tier volumes, thus saving performance tier space, money and time.
There's a new tiering policy that tiers all user blocks immediately to the cloud which is great for data already cold, and improved cold data reporting in System Manager.
Also the removal of the 1:20 ration gives improved aggregate efficiency compared with ONTAP 9.5, and 1 and 3 year subscription license terms provides more flexibility and enables OPEX accounting.
Furthermore, FabricPools in ONTAP 9.6 provides SVM-DR support for fast recovery of FabricPool volumes post-disaster, and FabricPool volumes on the performance tier can now be moved without impacting cloud tier volumes, thus saving performance tier space, money and time.
FlexGroup Volumes - There's new functionality for FlexGroup Volumes such as Elastic Sizing to prevent a no space error, ability to change a volumes name without having to recreate the volume, reducing the size of a volume without the need to touch the underlying member volumes, support for SMB Continuous Availability File Shares for Microsoft SQL Server and Hyper-V running over SMB to help reduce disruption and improve availability, and MetroCluster Support to provide continuous operation with zero data loss protection with no additional license fees and zero change management.
FlexCache - Hybrid Cloud Caching – FlexCache with ONTAP 9.6 enables caching to and from Cloud Volumes ONTAP volumes to further improve performance acceleration for read-intensive NFSv3 workloads, end-to-end data encryption, more cache volumes per node, origin volume feature support expansion, and cached file update resiliency.
FlexCache - Hybrid Cloud Caching – FlexCache with ONTAP 9.6 enables caching to and from Cloud Volumes ONTAP volumes to further improve performance acceleration for read-intensive NFSv3 workloads, end-to-end data encryption, more cache volumes per node, origin volume feature support expansion, and cached file update resiliency.
SnapMirror Synchronous
There's some nice enhancements in SnapMirror Synchronous, such as In-transit data encryption with TLS 1.2, which provides security for sensitive data in flight, plus synchronous to asynchronous SnapMirror cascades for backup/DR, and additional protocol support for NFSv4, SMB 2/3 and mixed volumes.
There's also additional interoperability for soft and hard quotas, and fpolicy.
There's some nice enhancements in SnapMirror Synchronous, such as In-transit data encryption with TLS 1.2, which provides security for sensitive data in flight, plus synchronous to asynchronous SnapMirror cascades for backup/DR, and additional protocol support for NFSv4, SMB 2/3 and mixed volumes.
There's also additional interoperability for soft and hard quotas, and fpolicy.
MetroCluster over IP – ONTAP 9.6 brings some much needed updates to MetroCluster over IP including support for entry level AFF and FAS systems allowing business continuity for deployments with smaller budgets, shared inter-site switch links which reduces MCC IP networking and deployment costs, planned switchover/switchback can now be performed in System Manager which simplifies DR testing and maintenance tasks.
Software Encryption – ONTAP 9.6 introduces NetApp Aggregate Encryption (NAE) where all volumes in an aggregate share the same key thus allowing deduplication across volumes in the aggregate enabling more space savings.
Multi-tenant Key Management for Data At-Rest Encryption – For multi-tenant clusters, each SVM (tenant) can now be configured with its own set of KMIP-compliant key managements servers, so if one tenant’s data is lawfully seized, the data of other tenant’s on the same cluster is unaffected – their data remains encrypted.
ONTAP Select 9.6 – 9.6 brings performance improvements to ONTAP Select allowing for deployments on NVMe SSDs and with more CPUs and memory, capacity pool improvements with capacity-based 1,2 or 3 year terms allows for minimal planning and flexible deployments, QoS minimum IOPS support, and a new setup utility VM simplifies the deployment and licensing of ONTAP Select clusters.
Software Encryption – ONTAP 9.6 introduces NetApp Aggregate Encryption (NAE) where all volumes in an aggregate share the same key thus allowing deduplication across volumes in the aggregate enabling more space savings.
Multi-tenant Key Management for Data At-Rest Encryption – For multi-tenant clusters, each SVM (tenant) can now be configured with its own set of KMIP-compliant key managements servers, so if one tenant’s data is lawfully seized, the data of other tenant’s on the same cluster is unaffected – their data remains encrypted.
ONTAP Select 9.6 – 9.6 brings performance improvements to ONTAP Select allowing for deployments on NVMe SSDs and with more CPUs and memory, capacity pool improvements with capacity-based 1,2 or 3 year terms allows for minimal planning and flexible deployments, QoS minimum IOPS support, and a new setup utility VM simplifies the deployment and licensing of ONTAP Select clusters.
New Hardware
To compliment the release of ONTAP 9.6, NetApp has also announced some new hardware.
Controllers and Shelves
AFF A320 - The AFF A320 is a next generation midrange NVMe Storage System in a compact 2U form-factor chassis with external 2U NVMe shelf. It has high bandwidth 100GbE onboard ports, and shared HA and cluster interconnect ports. Works with the new NS224 NVMe SSD shelf (see below).
Controllers and Shelves
AFF A320 - The AFF A320 is a next generation midrange NVMe Storage System in a compact 2U form-factor chassis with external 2U NVMe shelf. It has high bandwidth 100GbE onboard ports, and shared HA and cluster interconnect ports. Works with the new NS224 NVMe SSD shelf (see below).
NS224 NVMe SSD Storage Shelf – a NVMe-based storage expansion shelf in a 2U chassis with 24 internal NVMe SSDs. The shelf is capable of 400Gb/sec bandwidth (200Gb/sec per shelf module). Connectivity is via Ethernet using remote direct memory access (RDMA) over converged Ethernet (RoCE) and connects directly to the new AFF A320. 1.9TB, 3.8TB, and 7.6TB NVMe SSDs are supported.
Switches
NetApp BES-54348 – A 1U cluster interconnect switch supported by all AFF and FAS systems running ONTAP 9.5 and higher, two models are available depending on whether you require port-side intake or exhaust, supports both 10Gb and 40Gb Ethernet connections (2x QSFP28 100GbE for ISL, 16x SFP for 10GbE, 2x QSFP for 40GbE), additional ports can be licensed for use.
Cisco Nexus 92300YC – A 1.2U cluster interconnect switch for those that prefer to use Cisco, support is limited by ONTAP release, two models are available depending on whether you require port-side intake or exhaust, supports both 10Gb and 40Gb Ethernet connections, all ports are available for use.
ATTO FibreBridge 7600N – Used in MetroCluster environment, replaces the 7500N and provides better performance over the older model.