Drive More Simplicity, Efficiency, and Security with ONTAP 9.6
Jon Jacob
It’s May, which for many families means wrapping up the school year and getting ready for the kids to move up to the next grade—and maybe even a new school—hopefully after a fun summer vacation. For my family, this is especially relevant since my youngest daughter is graduating from high school and heading to college.
May is also an important transition time here at NetApp. Every 6 months, like clockwork, we roll out our newest version of NetApp® ONTAP® data management software.
Why is this important to you? Well, we understand you’re wrestling with a number of challenges:
- Simplifying infrastructure so an IT generalist can manage it
- Responding to new business opportunities and making sure that your IT is an enabler, not an inhibitor
- Protecting your data from increasing internal and external threats
- Improving application performance (both speed and latency) for your enterprise applications and new workloads like AI
- Getting data to where it’s needed across your hybrid cloud
- Reducing costs (isn’t this on every list of IT challenges?)
Each ONTAP release includes many innovations that help you address these challenges and get the most value out of your data. Our latest version, ONTAP 9.6, delivers significant enhancements in simplicity, operational efficiency, and security for your hybrid cloud.
Here’s how the new capabilities of ONTAP 9.6 can help you solve your IT challenges. Do any of these questions resonate with you?
Do you have a staff that is mostly IT generalists?
The improved simplicity in ONTAP and its management dashboard will help your staff quickly identify areas that need attention and then take the right steps to increase the efficiency, availability, and performance of your storage infrastructure. Plus, REST APIs increase automation.
Do you have a hybrid cloud strategy?
ONTAP gives you the flexibility to integrate your on-premises storage with even more clouds for tiering, caching, and data protection. ONTAP 9.6 supports the major public clouds—AWS, Azure, Google, Alibaba, and IBM Cloud.
Do you need to get more value out of your all-flash resources?
With ONTAP powering NetApp AFF all-flash systems, you can free up valuable storage capacity and consolidate even more business-critical workloads by easily identifying cold data and automatically tiering it to the cloud. And you have more cloud options to choose from, to match your cloud partnering strategy.
Do you have a geographically-dispersed workforce that needs to collaborate?
ONTAP gives you more options, now including public cloud, for caching hot datasets close to each of your teams so they get fast response times and can be more productive. Plus, ONTAP delivers even greater security for the cached data by providing encryption while it’s at rest and in transit.
Are you looking for even better performance for your key workloads?
The NVMe/FC capabilities of ONTAP deliver high throughput and consistent low latency for AFF systems—as low as 100µs. That high performance is now available for even more ecosystems, including VMware, Windows, and Oracle Linux in addition to SUSE and Red Hat Linux. Plus, storage path resiliency ensures high availability.
Do you need continuous data availability?
Now, smaller organizations as well as larger businesses with remote locations can deliver cost-effective business continuity in their ONTAP environments with NetApp MetroCluster™ support for entry-class AFF A220 and FAS2750 systems.
Are you concerned with increasing the security of your data?
ONTAP now delivers even stronger security and data protection, with over-the-wire encryption for more environments and encryption key management for multitenant deployments.
With the introduction of ONTAP 9.6, which begins shipping in May, you can use ONTAP in more ways, with less effort, and with even better data protection. Learn more today about how ONTAP 9.6 can help solve your specific business challenges.
Want to take a free test drive of ONTAP? Try our software-defined version to check out its leading capabilities.
What business challenges and infrastructure transitions can ONTAP help you with this month?
Jon Jacob
Jon is the Senior Product Marketing Manager for NetApp ONTAP data management software. He joined NetApp in 2010 and enjoys leading the cross-team collaboration that’s needed to successfully launch new solutions. Prior to NetApp, Jon had 10+ years of marketing experience at HP in the Business Critical Systems division, including three years based in Germany. Outside of NetApp, when Jon’s not out on a run or bike ride, he enjoys going to San Jose Sharks hockey games.
