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”.
Comments?