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FlexPod

TR-4801: FlexPod with FabricPool - Inactive Data Tiering to Amazon AWS S3

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Scott Kovacs, NetApp

Flash storage prices continue to fall, making it available to workloads and applications that were not previously considered candidates for flash storage. However, making the most efficient use of the storage investment is still critically important for IT managers. IT departments continue to be pressed to deliver higher-performing services with little or no budget increase. To help address these needs, NetApp FabricPool allows you to leverage cloud economics by moving infrequently used data off of expensive on-premises flash storage to a more cost-effective storage tier in the public cloud. Moving infrequently accessed data to the cloud frees up valuable flash storage space on AFF or FAS systems to deliver more capacity for business-critical workloads to the high-performance flash tier.

This technical report reviews the FabricPool data- tiering feature of NetApp ONTAP in the context of a FlexPod converged infrastructure architecture from NetApp and Cisco. You should be familiar with the FlexPod Datacenter converged infrastructure architecture and the ONTAP storage software to fully benefit from the concepts discussed in this technical report. Building on familiarity with FlexPod and ONTAP, we discuss FabricPool, how it works, and how it can be used to achieve more efficient use of on-premises flash storage. Much of the content in this report is covered in greater detail in TR-4598 FabricPool Best Practices and other ONTAP product documentation. The content has been condensed for a FlexPod infrastructure and does not completely cover all use cases for FabricPool. All features and concepts examined are available in ONTAP 9.6.

Additional information about FlexPod is available in TR-4036 FlexPod Datacenter Technical Specifications.