Cloud ONTAP – Silverton Consulting

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 d atasheet 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.

I have been at NetApp Insight2015 conference the past two days and have been struck with one common theme. They have been talking since the get-go about the Data Fabric and how Clustered Data ONTAP (cDOT) is the foundation to the NetApp Data Fabric which spans on premises, private cloud, off premises public cloud and everything in between.

But the truth of the matter is that it’s data that real needs to span all these domains. Hybrid cloud really needs to have data movement everywhere. NetApp cDOT is just the enabler that helps move the data around much easier.

NetApp cDOT data services

From a cDOT perspective, NetApp has available today:

Cloud ONTAP – a software defined ONTAP storage service executing in the cloud, operating on cloud server provider hardware using DAS storage and providing ONTAP data services for your private cloud resident data.
ONTAP Edge – similar to Cloud ONTAP, but operating on premises with customer commodity server & DAS hardware and providing ONTAP data services.
NetApp Private Storage (NPS) – NetApp storage systems operating in a “near cloud” environment that is directly connected to cloud service providers that provides NetApp storage services with low latency/high IOPs storage to cloud compute applications.
NetApp cDOT on premises storage hardware – NetApp storage hardware with All Flash FAS as well as normal disk-only and hybrid FAS storage hardware supplying ONTAP data services to on premises applications.

NetApp Data Fabric

NetApp’s Data Fabric is built on top of ONTAP data services and allows a customer to use any of the above storage instances to host their private data. Which is great in and of itself, but when you realize that a customer can also move their data from anyone of these ONTAP storage instances to any other storage instance that’s when you see the power of the Data Fabric.

The Data Fabric depends mostly on storage efficient ONTAP SnapMirror data replication and ONTAP data cloning capabilities. These services can be used to replicate ONTAP data (LUNs/volumes) from one cDOT storage instance to another and then use ONTAP data cloning services to create accessible copies of this data at the new location. This could be on premises to near cloud, to public cloud or back again, all within the confines of ONTAP data services.

Data Fabric in action

Now I like the concept but they also showed an impressive demo of using cDOT and AltaVault (NetApp’s solution acquired last year from Riverbed, their SteelStor backup appliance) to perform an application consistent backup of a SQL database. But once they had this it went a little crazy.

They SnapMirrored this data from the on premises storage to a near cloud, NPS storage instance, then cloned the data from the mirrors and after that fired up applications running in Azure to process the data. Then they shut down the Azure application and fired up a similar application in AWS using the exact same NPS hosted data. Of course they then SnapMirrored the same backup data (I think from the original on premises storage) to Cloud ONTAP, just to show it could be done there as well.

Ok I get it, you can replicate (mirror) data from any cDOT storage instance (whether on premises or remote site or near cloud NPS or in the cloud using Cloud ONTAP or …). Once there you can clone this data and use it with applications running in any environment running with access to this data instance (such as AWS, Azure and cloud service providers).

And I like the fact that all this can be accomplished in NetApp’s Snap Center software. And I especially like the fact that the clones don’t take up any extra space and the replicant mirroring is done in a quick, space efficient (read deduped) manner

But, having to setup a replication or mirror association between cDOT on premises and cDOT at NPS or Cloud ONTAP and then having to clone the volumes at the target side seems superflous. What I really want to do is just copy or move the data and have it be at the target site without the mirror association in the middle. It’s almost like what I want is CLONE that operates across cDOT storage instances wherever they reside.

Well I’m an analyst and don’t have to implement any of this (thank god). But what NetApp seems to have done is to use their current tools and ONTAP data service capabilities to allow customer data to move anywhere it needs to be, in customer controlled, space efficient, private and secure manner. Once hosted at the new site, applications have access to this data and customers still have all the ONTAP data services they had on premises but in cloud and near cloud locations.

Seems pretty impressive to me for all of a customer’s ONTAP data. But when you combine the Data Fabric with Foreign LUN Import (importing non-NetApp data into ONTAP storage) and FlexArray (storage virtualization under ONTAP) you can see how all the Data Fabric can apply to non-NetApp storage instances as well and then it becomes really interesting.

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There was a company that once said that “The Network is the Computer” but today, I think a better tag line is “The Data is the Hybrid Cloud”.

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