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Cloud Manager is evolving at such a rapid pace that it’s getting hard to keep track of all of the new features and improvements. So, in case you missed it, from Cloud Manager 3.8.6 and onwards, you can provision block storage volumes on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud using Cloud Manager.
What’s new here is not the cloud block storage. That’s been supported on Cloud Volumes ONTAP for years. It’s the ability to provision Cloud Volumes ONTAP iSCSI LUNs directly from the Cloud Manager UI, or via API calls.
Create a new Block Storage Volume on Cloud Manager by selecting "iSCSI"
NetApp offers Enterprise-grade Block Storage on The Cloud
Block storage delivers performance advantages making it most suitable for enterprise workloads such as transactional databases and applications with frequently changing data. When you attach block storage to a compute instance, it is treated like a disk drive controlled by the instance’s operating system or database.
The major cloud providers let you attach native block storage disks to cloud compute instances. While this is a good solution for a variety of workloads, many organizations today choose to use Cloud Volumes ONTAP block storage for their business applications. Cloud Volumes ONTAP runs natively on all of the major public clouds letting you create block storage volumes for your virtual machines and container instances that are optimized for availability, cost and performance. Here are some of the advantages you get from using Cloud Volumes ONTAP block storage volumes.
Highly Available & Backed-Up Storage
It is recommended to always deploy Cloud Volumes ONTAP as an HA-pair for high-availability. This enhances the protection of the iSCSI volumes you create with Cloud Manager preventing downtime. The backup feature integrated with Cloud Manager makes sure that a recent version of your data is constantly backed-up in a separate object storage bucket for quick restoration in the event of data corruption or deletion. Likewise, Cloud Manager lets you easily create a Disaster Recovery (DR) copy in a separate cloud region for protecting your data against natural disasters and major outages.
Cost Optimized
Your Cloud Volumes ONTAP block storage comes with inherent storage efficiency capabilities such as thin provisioning, deduplication, compression, compaction, cold data tiering, zero-capacity snapshots, and zero-capacity clones. These technologies deliver dramatic storage capacity savings. This means that when you provision block storage using Cloud Manager, you only consume a fraction of the storage you would have needed if you had connected your instance directly to native cloud block storage. Not only do you get the enhanced resilience, mobility, scalability and agility benefits motioned above, you also pay less.
DevOps Optimized
NetApp Cloud Block Storage delivers enhanced performance, reduced latency, integration with container orchestrators (e.g. Kubernetes, OpenShift, Docker Swarm) and the ability to instantly create dozens, or even hundreds of test and development environments from production without consuming additional storage capacity.
Multi-Attach
Cloud Volumes ONTAP iSCSI volumes can operate as shared disks attached to multiple instances. This is necessary for Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSCF) and Linux clusters. This capability also makes it possible to provision block storage for containers that span multiple availability zones.
Find Out More About Block Storage with Cloud Volumes ONTAP
With NetApp block storage through Cloud Manager and Cloud Volumes ONTAP, you can leverage the scalability and agility of the cloud while ensuring enterprise-grade data protection and efficiency as well as consistency and mobility across multiple cloud environments.
You can find a detailed walkthrough on how to provision block storage with Cloud Volumes ONTAP here. And to get some insight into how enterprises are leveraging block storage with Cloud Volumes ONTAP, check out these customer success stories.
