Announcing Cloud Volumes ONTAP HA on Google Cloud

Cloud Volumes ONTAP HA is now available on Google Cloud Platform

If you are one of the people who have been eagerly waiting for this announcement, stop reading this blog and go to get your HA architecture deployed.

Otherwise, you can keep reading to find out why some of the readers just left in such a rush.

I’ll start at the beginning.

When we first released CVO (Cloud Volumes ONTAP) on GCP (Google Cloud Platform) it was only available as a Single Node instance.

This let you manage your application data and files on GCP with all of the cool ONTAP features. Well… all of them except the High Availability configuration, aka the HA-pair. This is a feature that ensures enterprise reliability and provides continuous operations in case of infrastructure failures in your GCP environment.

If the data environment were only used for Disaster Recovery or testing, you could probably get away with deploying it on a single node CVO. But not when it’s production data. Production and other mission critical data always has to be deployed on an HA-pair.

Why? Because the VM instance CVO runs on, and the Persistent Disks it uses to store data can become temporarily unavailable. This could occur during maintenance, software updates or an unplanned outage. If this happens while an application is writing data, that data could be lost. And if it’s a mission critical application, this data loss would have business repercussions.

The CVO HA-pair deployment solves this problem by taking advantage of the tools and services that Google Cloud enables for high-availability. And the cool thing about this, is that you don’t have to worry about integrating these tools into your architecture, as you would if you were using native cloud services. Cloud Manager does all of that for you automatically.

CVO with HA includes the 3 key elements of High Availability

1. Redundancy – There are 2 separate instances of CVO, each with all of the compute, storage and network resources necessary for operating independently.
2. Monitoring – The system continuously checks whether the CVO components are available.
3. Failover and failback – The secondary instance switches to become primary if the primary fails, and then switches back once the primary has recovered.

When you deploy a CVO HA-pair on GCP, you get 2 CVO nodes, preconfigured to mirror each other’s data. Data that the connected applications and users write, is stored in both CVO nodes and can be read from either of them. The nodes can be deployed in the same zone or in different zones.

Cloud Volumes ONTAP HA on Google Cloud

If you choose to deploy the CVO HA-pair in different zones, Cloud Manager also deploys a Mediator in a third zone. The Mediator takes care of the failover and failback if one of the nodes becomes temporarily unavailable.

The perfect data environment for enterprise workloads on GCP

Google Cloud Platform provides the infrastructure, the tools and the services necessary for running high performance, mission critical workloads. Cloud Manager bakes these tools and services into your data environment and adds NetApp’s secret sauce in the form of Cloud Volumes ONTAP, a rich layer of management capabilities for multiple flavors of data. 

Now, together with the final ingredient, the HA-pair, these capabilities make CVO an ideal solution for hosting your enterprise workloads on GCP.

Here are some of these advanced data management features:

• Centralized and consistent storage operations - Whether your data is stored on ONTAP on-premises, or on CVO on AWS, Azure, or GCP, it looks the same, acts the same, supports the same features, and is all controlled through a single endpoint.
• Cost efficiency on steroids – When using CVO, your storage capacity is thin-provisioned and auto-scaled, and your data is deduped, compressed, compacted, thin-snapshotted, thin-cloned, thin-cached, and intelligently tiered to low cost object storage. This is so that you always get the best performance for the lowest cost and can finally stop worrying about storage costs.
• Built-in data protection – CVO adds all of the ONTAP security features on top of the native security features you get from the cloud provider. Plus, you get built-in HA, DR, backup as well as privacy compliance.

Data integrity and redundancy built into your GCP architecture

Now, for the sake of the readers who skipped to the end because they didn’t have the time to read this entire post, here’s the short version.

• Cloud Volumes ONTAP on GCP now supports HA for mission-critical production data.
• HA is usually complex, but with CVO your get HA architecture complete out-of-the-box.
• HA is usually expensive, but CVO’s many cost optimization features make it affordable.
• RPO=0: Your critical workloads are protected against data loss due to downtime.
• RTO<60sec: Fast recovery so you can spend less time on downtime-related problems.
• There’s a 30-day free trial - If you haven’t deployed CVO yet, give it a try today.