We attended a NetApp analyst event in their CA HQ last week and they had some interesting announcements as well other information to share. 1st up new faster ONTAP storage.
NVMeoF AFF
NetApp announced this week that their latest generation AFF (All Flash FAS) systems will support FC NVMeoF. We asked if this was just for NVMe SSDs or did it apply to all AFF media. The answer was it’s just another host interface which the customer can license for NVMe SSDs (available only on AFF F800) or SAS SSDs (A700S, A700, and A300). The only AFF not supporting the new host interface is their lowend AFF A220.
As for which NVMeoF, they only support FC at the moment, and it’s our belief that the FC NVMeoF spec is most well defined these days and the FC switch hardware (Brocade-Broadcom since Gen 5, now shipping Gen 6, Cisco not sure) already has NVMeoF support.
NetApp also mentioned support for 100GbE (A800 & A700S only) and 32Gbs FC hardware (all AFF systems but A220). So, presumably they offer NVMeoF for both 32Gbps and 16Gbps FC.
No word on when this will be available for Ethernet FCoE or iSCSI (iNVMe?) but with all the major storage vendors bar one, moving to NVMe SSDs it’s only a matter of time before they also support Ethernet NVMeoF.
As for AFF NVMeoF performance, the answer wasn’t entirely satisfactory. The indication was that the interface reduced response time by 10 usecs or so for NVMe SSDs over SAS SSDs. But I didn’t see any other performance information to substantiate that.
We did see on their AFF datasheet that with NVMe SSDs and NVMeoF FC, the AFF A800 response time was sub 200usec with throughput of 300GB/s (in a 24 node cluster, 12 HA pairs). This means they add only about 100usec for ONTAP data services, a decent trade off from our perspective. Later in their datasheet they say the A800 is capable of 1.3M IOPS and sub-500usec latencies. Unsure why they quoted both numbers.
Cloud Data Volumes
NetApp is taking storage to the cloud. They just announced that NetApp Cloud Data Volumes will be available as a native service under Google Cloud Platform (GCP). NetApp Cloud Data Volume is a storage-as-a-service offering that provides on demand ONTAP file services in the cloud.
For GCP, both Google and NetApp will be offering the service. Dianne Green, GCP VP said Cloud Data Volumes are a bit like Kubernetes, disruption without disrupting. Customers can easily migrate their onprem file based applications to the cloud without having to worry about the performance of their data or data protection for that matter.
Getting the data there is another matter, but NetApp has other services like CloudSync and someday (maybe for Cloud Data Volumes), SnapMirror, which can help customers move data to and from the cloud.
Currently Cloud Data Volumes are in public preview as an Microsoft Azure Enterprise NFS (and SMB) service. It’s also in beta (I think) in AWS marketplace. And availability on GCP is still restricted. There’s a lot of emphasis at NetApp events on Cloud Data Volumes given its current status on public cloud providers but we think they are trying to gain some experience before they roll it out to the rest of the world.
However, Jean English, NetApp CMO mentioned that NetApp’s Cloud Data Service business unit has over 1800 customers and currently supports a multi-PB storage footprint in various clouds. Note, this is not just Cloud Data Volumes but comprises all NetApp Cloud Data Services, which includes ONTAP Cloud, NPS, CloudSync, AltaVault, etc. Nonetheless, it’s an impressive indicator of just how far they have come in applying their storage magic to the public cloud in a short time. The hyperscalers (read public cloud providers) say NetApp is 2 or more years ahead of all the other competition and from what we can see, it’s true.
One of the key differentiators between NetApp Cloud Data Volumes and ONTAP Cloud is performance SLAs. Cloud Data Volume customers can select and purchase a specified performance SLA. We believe it comes at three levels and is normally purchased on a pay as you go, consumption based, service offering. However, it’s also available to be billed periodically, other purchase options may be available as well.
When asked what storage was behind the service, the only thing NetApp would confirm was that it was ONTAP storage, present in public cloud data centers in various regions. So Cloud Data Volumes is available in only specific regions but I would expect that to expand over time.
Data Visualization Center
They also christened their new Data Visualization Center (DVC) and we had a multi-course meal at the Bistro at the center. The DVC had a wrap around, 1.5 floor tall screen which showed some of NetApp customer success stories. Inside the screen was a more immersive setting and there was plenty of VR equipment in work spaces alongside customer conference rooms.
Full Disclosure: NetApp paid for all our travel, hotel and food during the analyst event and gave us all Google Home Minis as going away presents and NetApp is a long time customer of my firm.
