NetApp co-founder, Dave Hitz announced he was becoming a NetApp Founder Emeritus at the Storage Field Day (SFD18) show. He gave a great session about what he and his Hitz foundation’s been doing (for one example see our Archeology meets big data, post). He also discussed at length where he felt the storage world (and NetApp) must do to address the opportunities of the new cloud world. But this post isn’t about Dave, it’s about NetApp Data Availability Service, NDAS.
NetApp NDAS, currently in Beta but GAing (hopefully) later this year, is an AWS marketplace data orchestration solution that manages primary to secondary to S3 movement for ONTAP data. Essentially, NetApp Data Availability Services extends ONTAP data lifecycle management to AWS cloud. But it’s more than just a way to archive ONTAP data.
NDAS orchestrates Snapmirror services across ONTAP systems and AWS. But once your ONTAP data is in S3 it supplies access to that data for authorized AWS applications and services. That way one can use their ONTAP data to provide data analytics, train AI models, and do just about anything you can do with AWS applications today. By using NDAS, customers can extract more value from their ONTAP data.
NDAS is not just copying data to S3 but is also copying ONTAP metadata, catalogues and other information that provides context for that data. By copying ONTAP catalog information, customers and authorized end users can have file level access to ONTAP data residing in S3 objects.
NDAS today, only supports copying data from secondary ONTAP systems to S3. But a future enhancement will expand this to copy primary ONTAP data to S3.
How does NDAS work
NDAS provisions (your) EC2 instances, and middleware to read the data from the secondary systems and copy it to S3 buckets which you provide. NDAS after initial configuration to point to your ONTAP secondary storage systems, will autodiscover all the data available that can be copied to the cloud.
NDAS will start cataloguing your ONTAP data. NDAS EC2 instances support the NDAS copy, view and a Google-like search processes.
NDAS search presents a simplified file system view into your ONTAP data copied to S3. That way customers can identify data that could be used for AI training or data analytics that run in the cloud to access the data.
There’s extensive security to insure that NDAS is properly authorized to access your ONTAP data. Normal S3 security options also apply such as to have the data be encrypted on S3. NDAS data is automatically encrypted in flight.
Moreover, NDAS S3 bucket data can be replicated across AWS regions . Also serverless/lambda funationality are fully supported from or NDAS S3 buckets. .
What can it do with the data
AWS applications can access the data directly through NDAS APIs. Or customers can manually extract data they want to further process using the NDAS GUI to identify and copy data of interests. NDAS essentially creates a small app layer that allows users to view and access the ONTAP data in S3 as a file system.
One can have different NDAS AMIs operating in different regions for faster access or to support GDPR compliance requirements. Alternatively, a customer could have one NDAS AMI accessing all their secondary ONTAP instances.
NDAS is intended to provide a data analyst or IT generalist access to ONTAP data. This way AI training and big data analytics applications which run easily in the cloud, can have access to ONTAP data. In this way, customers can more effectively utilize data that IT has been storing and maintaining, since time began.
One NDAS beta customer is a MLB team. They have over time instrumented their stadiums to generate lot’s of data about pitch speed, rotation, ball location as it crosses the plate, etc. The problem with all this data is siloed in onprem or IOT systems that generated it. But the customer wants to use the data to improve players, coaches and the viewer experience. And all that needs tools, applications and software that’s just not available to run in the data center. But with NDAS all this data is now available to cloud applications.
NDAS is supported by any ONTAP 9.5 or later (FAS, AFF, Cloud ONTAP, ONTAPselect) secondary storage system. ONTAP 9.5 software contains all the services required to support NDAS. This includes the copy-to-cloud APIs, as well as the NDAS proxy, which supplies the secure interface to NDAS operating in the cloud.
NetApp’s NDAS sessions are pretty informative. Anyone interested in finding out more should checkout the videos available on TechFieldDay website and Dave’s session is also worth a view.
For more information on Dave’s session and NDAS check out:
NetApp, Cloudier than ever by Enrico Signoretti (@ESignoretti)
NetApp and the space in between by Dan Frith (@PenguinPunk)
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