NetApp Insight 2021: AWS Automation, Ransomware Protection & File-Object Duality

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NetApp’s annual tech conference happened last week, and despite its digital nature, was chock-full of announcements from the company and overall buzz about hybrid cloud storage and data value. As an aside, NetApp customers are using Komprise to intelligently manage data and move to the cloud. Read more about our partnership here.

Here are a few highlights that we tracked from NetApp Insight:

Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP:

This is a fully managed service that provides highly reliable, scalable cloud file storage built on NetApp’s ONTAP hybrid cloud data management software. Why is this a big deal? This is not simply running an ONTAP VM on AWS file storage infrastructure. This is ONTAP as a fully integrated AWS service. Customers simply consume the service without any of the management tasks typically associated with running enterprise NAS.

Sounds awesome—and there is no better way to move and get value from your data with FSx for NetAPP ONTAP than Komprise. Yes, that’s a mouthful, but let me break this down.

Why Komprise for NetApp Data Management?

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Read the White Paper: Komprise Transparent Move Technology™
Komprise analyzes your data so you can determine optimal placement, whether in your on-premises storage or in the cloud.

The analysis shows you how you can tier infrequently accessed data to lower cost AWS S3 storage while maintaining transparent access at source and destination. With your data footprint reduced to hot data only, you get several benefits:

  • Komprise manages the migration for you and with cold data already tiered to AWS S3 there is less data to move, so migrations are faster.
  • Cut costs with right-sized FSx for ONTAP instance as you are only storing hot data on FSx.
  • Komprise Deep Analytics gives you a global file index so you can analyze data in place, across all your storage, before you move it.
  • Komprise Transparent Move Technology lets you access your tiered FSx files via the S3 APIs to take advantage of cloud compute, Lambda functions and analytics.
  • Use Komprise for continual replication from third-party NAS to FSx, enabling DR in the cloud.

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Enhanced Ransomware Protection:

Komprise-Ransomware-promoNetApp is also bolstering ransomware defense. As reported in Blocks & Files: “ONTAP, v9.10.1 as we understand it, will be able to protect against ransomware attacks autonomously, based on machine learning with integrated preemptive detection and accelerated data recovery. The system will monitor IO patterns and, if it detects unusual activity, will inform the cloud- and AI-based Active IQ array monitoring system. ONTAP will also make a snapshot of the relevant data as a preventive measure.” Read about ransomware protection with Komprise here.

File-Object Duality:

Komprise lets you read data stored in object storage via the original NAS protocol (this works for NetApp dual shares as well) without rehydrating to the original storage. If you are interested in how this can benefit you in a real-world scenario check out this Insight session: CSS-1210-2 – Yale New Haven Health: Computational Health Platform Evolution.

KurianNetApp CEO George Kurian’s keynote was lofty:

Pointing to the preeminence of data-driven strategies and how IT leaders can support them: “From a business strategy standpoint, lean into digital and cloud. Pick a few big bets with hard impact business cases and move fast. Second, transform your IT portfolio and platform. Leverage cloud while simultaneously consolidating and simplifying data management. And third, be cloud-native. Develop cloud-native ways of working with cloud-native technologies.”

This is the second year that NetApp Insight has been a virtual event and like so many other events that have gone digital, we miss the personal interactions. On the plus side, all the content is available on-demand and you can access it all at netapp.tv. Hoping 2022 brings us all back in person!

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Getting Started with Komprise:

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