Enterprises are moving to the cloud [or rather, are continuing to], and the Hyperscalers are hungry to have them. While some companies are being selective in their migration, moving only applications that meet specific criteria - such as those without legal restrictions - others have an all-in mandate. The task of transforming from custom built data centers to general purpose cloud is not easy, especially for applications not born in the cloud. From the retail firm with its enterprise class databases demanding gigabytes of bandwidth, to the financials firm running IO hungry Monte Carlo simulations requiring a single namespace, to the genomics firm running highly demanding scale out HPC workloads, their demands are high, and the cloud had better be ready. Enter NetApp!!!
Storage is hard, and the one size fits all answer does not truly fit every question. Taking the hard-won experience which comes from twenty-six years of slogging it out in the trenches with these very customers, NetApp has the tools to meet the demands of the enterprise.
Cloud Volumes ONTAP - The Benefits of ONPREM Storage Now Available in The Cloud
Cloud Volumes ONTAP is a manage-your-self IaaS licensed storage offering replete with the capabilities used by folks with experience supporting physical ONTAP nodes in their own datacenters. Need an extension from your on-premises environment to the cloud, or perhaps you are looking to leverage your existing storage knowledge, tools and processes? In that case, consider Cloud Volumes ONTAP.
Consider the following use cases ideal for Cloud Volumes ONTAP:
- For applications with large capacity needs, Cloud Volumes ONTAP supports FabricPools which now tiers cold data blocks to Object Storage and back again seamlessly.
- For customers desiring a SnapMirror or SnapVault target with limitless capacity, consider aiming onprem systems at a Cloud Volumes ONTAP cluster. When configured with support for FabricPools, the Cloud Volumes ONTAP system ties straight into AWS S3. As a SnapMirror target, Cloud Volumes ONTAP makes for a great test/dev extension!!
- For applications with a very high file count profile and a single namespace requirement, Cloud Volumes ONTAP supports Flexgroup volumes. While each Cloud Volumes Service volume supports up to 50,000,000 files and directories, each Flexgroup volume supports a virtually limitless number of files and directories.
- For those looking for a lift and shift model of cloud migration and for whom block is the onprem protocol, Cloud Volumes ONTAP supports the iSCSI protocol in addition to NFS and SMB.
- For those organization mandated by compliance or corporate security protocol to manage their own encryption keys, Cloud Volume ONTAP is the go-to product as Cloud Volumes Service supports this capability as part of the offering.
- For those organization mandated by compliance or corporate security protocol to maintain their data inside their controlled environment, Cloud Volume ONTAP is the go-to product as all data stays within the company’s infrastructure (VPC, S3 Buckets).
- For business needs calling for WORM (write once read many) storage in order to comply with regulatory mandates or internal IT governance, Cloud Volumes ONTAP now supports SnapLock Enterprise.
Capacity, Capacity, and Yet More Capacity
Cloud Volumes ONTAP also has a cost cutting measure up its sleeve. Between autonomous data tiering wherein data moves to Object Storage and back again based on usage patterns, and the three space efficiency engines (Deduplication, Compression, Compaction), Cloud Volumes ONTAP decreases your overall cost of operations by decreasing your cost-per-gigabyte.
- Deduplication eliminates identical blocks, doing so not just within but between volumes within an aggregate.
- Compression decreases the dataset size.
- Compaction decreases space consumption even further by stuffing more data into partially filled blocks.
The ability for Cloud Volumes ONTAP to service primary workloads remains important given its use as an onprem extension or even as a disaster recovery destination.
Cloud Volumes Services for AWS – A Performant & Reliable No-Brainer
Cloud Volumes Service (a NoOp service) is a cloud-based data storage technology built to provide a high performing NFS or SMB protocol experience. That which is good for the old is good for the new, give your born in the cloud applications access to large amounts of I/O with low read and write latency (~1ms in most regions) or large amount of bandwidth be it scale up or scale out. Haven’t considered this before, well that’s fair as the option wasn’t available in the cloud before.
Add space efficient instantaneous snapshots to your tool chest and protect your data against any number of error or failure scenarios. Cloud Volumes Service for AWS supports hundreds of snapshots without any impact to performance providing not just numerous restore points but a cloning capability as well. An example use case to consider for this capability comes the NetApp engineering build environment wherein clones and containers are used together. Why checkout or compile code when you could snapshot, clone, then access golden versions - that’s exactly what our engineering build team does. Thus, primary workloads are not the only workloads benefiting from Cloud Volumes Service - think DevOps workflow’s such as test and development.
Cloud Volumes Service for AWS is a fully managed storage service built for simplicity, performance, and scalability. Truly, CVS will take your business, its applications and workflows “further, faster.” Take a moment to consider the savings in operational costs and the potential savings in compute costs realized by moving your workloads to Cloud Volumes Service.
Further, FASTER - Less Expensively
As evidence of the significant performance capabilities of the Cloud Volumes Service for AWS, the following graph depicts one and two CVS volumes and compares them against eleven GP2 EBS volumes. The workload depicted is a 75% read 25% update OLTP workload (SLOB2) run against an Oracle Enterprise edition 12.2c database run within variously sized EC2 instances. The number and size of EBS volumes were determined based upon the number of drives required to completely consume the storage backend of the C5.18xlarge instance type with its 80,000 iop EBS optimized storage network backend.
It’s important to call out that with Elastic Block Storage, available bandwidth is tied to the size of the virtual machine. As backend storage bandwidth is increased with virtual machine size, scaling up of the virtual machine is required to exact more disk bandwidth on behalf of the application and is totally avoidable with the NetApp Cloud Volume Service for AWS. Enable smaller vm’s to do the work previously only possible with larger and more expensive machines and reclaim compute costs lost to premature scale up.
Notice from the diagram that with Cloud Volumes Service volumes, Oracle was enabled to run as many database physical i/o’s with the c5.2xlarge and c5.4xlarge as was only possible previously with the c5.18xlarge instance type configured with EBS.
Control your compute costs with the Cloud Volumes Service for AWS!!
Cloud Volumes Service empowers you to control your costs further yet via service levels. By selecting the service level that most meets business need, you can tune your costs for performance, capacity, or a balance of the two. With the Extreme service level, the 8K database block size shown above, CVS delivers a cost-per-iop of $0.187 as compared to the $0.033 per iop achieved with Amazon’s GP2 EBS type of disk.
These (Cloud Volumes Service and Cloud Volumes ONTAP) are just a few of the services NetApp brings to the table to aid in the go to cloud journey. Whether a business is following an all-in mandate or a find-the-fit approach to cloud, AWS and NetApp likely have the tools to aid in the process.
Come check out for yourself at Cloud Central to learn more!!