Before you begin your journey to cloud computing, consider taking a few steps to make the path a bit smoother. Ensuring business continuity and maintaining your current NFS and SMB file structures are ground rules for any data migration to the cloud. Addressing file data security during the migration, and then mastering the new automated database tools you’ll have at your fingertips, will help you to reduce costs while maximizing performance in your new platform.
The first step: Take a deep breath. You’re about to move to an encrypted, highly scalable environment with a built-in undo button. Next, take a look at your current NFS and SMB protocols. If your application is already relying on NFS or SMB file constructs, you want to minimize changes to those applications and structures. NetApp® Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud offers full support for SMB, NFSv3, and the forthcoming NFSv4 (meaning that it’s fully compatible with Windows, Unix, and Linux).
The sheer amount of data in on-premises storage—along with other considerations like transfer speed, flexibility, costs, error reporting, and recovery—is a critical factor in determining the success of your move to the cloud. NetApp Cloud Volumes Service automates your migration process, saving money on administrative tasks and time on deployment, even when deploying multiple databases. And you’ll have access to your file system during the data migration process.
Because Cloud Volumes Service is completely integrated with your file directory metadata, it maintains domain credentials, access and authentication, and group memberships, so your existing security policies and user access remain unchanged.
Once your data arrives in the cloud, you have access to a wide array of tools to secure, monitor, and manage your mission-critical data, saving you costly and unnecessary data management overhead expenses. Cloud Sync and NetApp Snapshot™ copies maintain your databases, preventing data corruption and loss.
Cloud Sync, one of NetApp’s signature automation tools, was designed to move data from any source to any target. It supports all file formats, has built-in error tracking, reporting, and recovery, and continuously syncs your data from the moment you press Go.
Snapshot copies are point-in-time, rapidly created representations of your data that act as logical backups. They take less than a second to make, and they ensure business continuity with no data loss, with a recovery time of 60 seconds.
Migrating your NFS and SMB file shares correctly can help reduce the costs associated with data migration to the cloud, lower ongoing costs for cloud services, and minimize or eliminate developer costs. NetApp Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud Platform gives you access to processes like data tiering, which lets you run infrequently used, low-performance workloads on inexpensive storage and moves high-performance workloads to higher-performing drives.
The Cloud Volumes Service toolkit of sophisticated data management tools includes service- level configuration. Database administrators can create and quickly manage separate storage tiers (Standard, Premium, or Extreme) based on the performance requirements of the data to be stored. And you only pay for what you use, meaning that you can change your service level to meet your needs, which saves on cloud costs. You can change the provisioning of your volumes from 0TB to 100TB in seconds.
To learn more about NetApp Cloud Volumes for Google Cloud, download our new eBook, Running NFS and SMB in the Cloud: 5 Points to Consider. You can also visit netapp.com/googlecloud to request a demo or sign up for exclusive access.