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NetApp Solutions

Concepts and Components

Contributors banum-netapp mboglesby

Artificial Intelligence

AI is a computer science discipline in which computers are trained to mimic the cognitive functions of the human mind. AI developers train computers to learn and to solve problems in a manner that is similar to, or even superior to, humans. Deep learning and machine learning are subfields of AI. Organizations are increasingly adopting AI, ML, and DL to support their critical business needs. Some examples are as follows:

  • Analyzing large amounts of data to unearth previously unknown business insights

  • Interacting directly with customers by using natural language processing

  • Automating various business processes and functions

Modern AI training and inference workloads require massively parallel computing capabilities. Therefore, GPUs are increasingly being used to execute AI operations because the parallel processing capabilities of GPUs are vastly superior to those of general-purpose CPUs.

Containers

Containers are isolated user-space instances that run on top of a shared host operating system kernel. The adoption of containers is increasing rapidly. Containers offer many of the same application sandboxing benefits that virtual machines (VMs) offer. However, because the hypervisor and guest operating system layers that VMs rely on have been eliminated, containers are far more lightweight. The following figure depicts a visualization of virtual machines versus containers.

Containers also allow the efficient packaging of application dependencies, run times, and so on, directly with an application. The most commonly used container packaging format is the Docker container. An application that has been containerized in the Docker container format can be executed on any machine that can run Docker containers. This is true even if the application’s dependencies are not present on the machine because all dependencies are packaged in the container itself. For more information, visit the Docker website.

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Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an open source, distributed, container orchestration platform that was originally designed by Google and is now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Kubernetes enables the automation of deployment, management, and scaling functions for containerized applications. In recent years, Kubernetes has emerged as the dominant container orchestration platform. Although other container packaging formats and run times are supported, Kubernetes is most often used as an orchestration system for Docker containers. For more information, visit the Kubernetes website.

NetApp Trident

Trident is an open source storage orchestrator developed and maintained by NetApp that greatly simplifies the creation, management, and consumption of persistent storage for Kubernetes workloads. Trident, itself a Kubernetes-native application, runs directly within a Kubernetes cluster. With Trident, Kubernetes users (developers, data scientists, Kubernetes administrators, and so on) can create, manage, and interact with persistent storage volumes in the standard Kubernetes format that they are already familiar with. At the same time, they can take advantage of NetApp advanced data management capabilities and a data fabric that is powered by NetApp technology. Trident abstracts away the complexities of persistent storage and makes it simple to consume. For more information, visit the Trident website.

NVIDIA DeepOps

DeepOps is an open source project from NVIDIA that, by using Ansible, automates the deployment of GPU server clusters according to best practices. DeepOps is modular and can be used for various deployment tasks. For this document and the validation exercise that it describes, DeepOps is used to deploy a Kubernetes cluster that consists of GPU server worker nodes. For more information, visit the DeepOps website.

Kubeflow

Kubeflow is an open source AI and ML toolkit for Kubernetes that was originally developed by Google. The Kubeflow project makes deployments of AI and ML workflows on Kubernetes simple, portable, and scalable. Kubeflow abstracts away the intricacies of Kubernetes, allowing data scientists to focus on what they know best―data science. See the following figure for a visualization. Kubeflow has been gaining significant traction as enterprise IT departments have increasingly standardized on Kubernetes. For more information, visit the Kubeflow website.

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Kubeflow Pipelines

Kubeflow Pipelines are a key component of Kubeflow. Kubeflow Pipelines are a platform and standard for defining and deploying portable and scalable AI and ML workflows. For more information, see the official Kubeflow documentation.

Jupyter Notebook Server

A Jupyter Notebook Server is an open source web application that allows data scientists to create wiki-like documents called Jupyter Notebooks that contain live code as well as descriptive test. Jupyter Notebooks are widely used in the AI and ML community as a means of documenting, storing, and sharing AI and ML projects. Kubeflow simplifies the provisioning and deployment of Jupyter Notebook Servers on Kubernetes. For more information on Jupyter Notebooks, visit the Jupyter website. For more information about Jupyter Notebooks within the context of Kubeflow, see the official Kubeflow documentation.

Apache Airflow

Apache Airflow is an open-source workflow management platform that enables programmatic authoring, scheduling, and monitoring for complex enterprise workflows. It is often used to automate ETL and data pipeline workflows, but it is not limited to these types of workflows. The Airflow project was started by Airbnb but has since become very popular in the industry and now falls under the auspices of The Apache Software Foundation. Airflow is written in Python, Airflow workflows are created via Python scripts, and Airflow is designed under the principle of "configuration as code.” Many enterprise Airflow users now run Airflow on top of Kubernetes.

Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs)

In Airflow, workflows are called Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs). DAGs are made up of tasks that are executed in sequence, in parallel, or a combination of the two, depending on the DAG definition. The Airflow scheduler executes individual tasks on an array of workers, adhering to the task-level dependencies that are specified in the DAG definition. DAGs are defined and created via Python scripts.

NetApp ONTAP 9

NetApp ONTAP 9 is the latest generation of storage management software from NetApp that enables businesses like yours to modernize infrastructure and to transition to a cloud-ready data center. With industry-leading data management capabilities, ONTAP enables you to manage and protect your data with a single set of tools regardless of where that data resides. You can also move data freely to wherever you need it: the edge, the core, or the cloud. ONTAP 9 includes numerous features that simplify data management, accelerate and protect your critical data, and future-proof your infrastructure across hybrid cloud architectures.

Simplify Data Management

Data management is crucial for your enterprise IT operations so that you can use appropriate resources for your applications and datasets. ONTAP includes the following features to streamline and simplify your operations and reduce your total cost of operation:

  • Inline data compaction and expanded deduplication. Data compaction reduces wasted space inside storage blocks, and deduplication significantly increases effective capacity.

  • Minimum, maximum, and adaptive quality of service (QoS). Granular QoS controls help maintain performance levels for critical applications in highly shared environments.

  • ONTAP FabricPool. This feature provides automatic tiering of cold data to public and private cloud storage options, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, and NetApp StorageGRID object-based storage.

Accelerate and Protect Data

ONTAP delivers superior levels of performance and data protection and extends these capabilities with the following features:

  • High performance and low latency. ONTAP offers the highest possible throughput at the lowest possible latency.

  • NetApp ONTAP FlexGroup technology. A FlexGroup volume is a high-performance data container that can scale linearly to up to 20PB and 400 billion files, providing a single namespace that simplifies data management.

  • Data protection. ONTAP provides built-in data protection capabilities with common management across all platforms.

  • NetApp Volume Encryption. ONTAP offers native volume-level encryption with both onboard and external key management support.

Future-Proof Infrastructure

ONTAP 9 helps meet your demanding and constantly changing business needs:

  • Seamless scaling and nondisruptive operations. ONTAP supports the nondisruptive addition of capacity to existing controllers and to scale-out clusters. You can upgrade to the latest technologies, such as NVMe and 32Gb FC, without costly data migrations or outages.

  • Cloud connection. ONTAP is one of the most cloud-connected storage management software, with options for software-defined storage (ONTAP Select) and cloud-native instances (NetApp Cloud Volumes Service) in all public clouds.

  • Integration with emerging applications. By using the same infrastructure that supports existing enterprise apps, ONTAP offers enterprise-grade data services for next-generation platforms and applications such as OpenStack, Hadoop, and MongoDB.

NetApp Snapshot Copies

A NetApp Snapshot copy is a read-only, point-in-time image of a volume. The image consumes minimal storage space and incurs negligible performance overhead because it only records changes to files create since the last Snapshot copy was made, as depicted in the following figure.

Snapshot copies owe their efficiency to the core ONTAP storage virtualization technology, the Write Anywhere File Layout (WAFL). Like a database, WAFL uses metadata to point to actual data blocks on disk. But, unlike a database, WAFL does not overwrite existing blocks. It writes updated data to a new block and changes the metadata. It's because ONTAP references metadata when it creates a Snapshot copy, rather than copying data blocks, that Snapshot copies are so efficient. Doing so eliminates the seek time that other systems incur in locating the blocks to copy, as well as the cost of making the copy itself.

You can use a Snapshot copy to recover individual files or LUNs or to restore the entire contents of a volume. ONTAP compares pointer information in the Snapshot copy with data on disk to reconstruct the missing or damaged object, without downtime or a significant performance cost.

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NetApp FlexClone Technology

NetApp FlexClone technology references Snapshot metadata to create writable, point-in-time copies of a volume. Copies share data blocks with their parents, consuming no storage except what is required for metadata until changes are written to the copy, as depicted in the following figure. Where traditional copies can take minutes or even hours to create, FlexClone software lets you copy even the largest datasets almost instantaneously. That makes it ideal for situations in which you need multiple copies of identical datasets (a development workspace, for example) or temporary copies of a dataset (testing an application against a production dataset).

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NetApp SnapMirror Data Replication Technology

NetApp SnapMirror software is a cost-effective, easy-to-use unified replication solution across the data fabric. It replicates data at high speeds over LAN or WAN. It gives you high data availability and fast data replication for applications of all types, including business critical applications in both virtual and traditional environments. When you replicate data to one or more NetApp storage systems and continually update the secondary data, your data is kept current and is available whenever you need it. No external replication servers are required. See the following figure for an example of an architecture that leverages SnapMirror technology.

SnapMirror software leverages NetApp ONTAP storage efficiencies by sending only changed blocks over the network. SnapMirror software also uses built-in network compression to accelerate data transfers and reduce network bandwidth utilization by up to 70%. With SnapMirror technology, you can leverage one thin replication data stream to create a single repository that maintains both the active mirror and prior point-in-time copies, reducing network traffic by up to 50%.

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NetApp BlueXP Copy and Sync

BlueXP Copy and Sync is a NetApp service for rapid and secure data synchronization. Whether you need to transfer files between on-premises NFS or SMB file shares, NetApp StorageGRID, NetApp ONTAP S3, NetApp Cloud Volumes Service, Azure NetApp Files, AWS S3, AWS EFS, Azure Blob, Google Cloud Storage, or IBM Cloud Object Storage, BlueXP Copy and Sync moves the files where you need them quickly and securely.

After your data is transferred, it is fully available for use on both source and target. BlueXP Copy and Sync can sync data on-demand when an update is triggered or continuously sync data based on a predefined schedule. Regardless, BlueXP Copy and Sync only moves the deltas, so time and money spent on data replication is minimized.

BlueXP Copy and Sync is a software as a service (SaaS) tool that is extremely simple to set up and use. Data transfers that are triggered by BlueXP Copy and Sync are carried out by data brokers. BlueXP Copy and Sync data brokers can be deployed in AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, or on-premises.

NetApp XCP

NetApp XCP is client-based software for any-to-NetApp and NetApp-to-NetApp data migrations and file system insights. XCP is designed to scale and achieve maximum performance by utilizing all available system resources to handle high-volume datasets and high-performance migrations. XCP helps you to gain complete visibility into the file system with the option to generate reports.

NetApp XCP is available in a single package that supports NFS and SMB protocols. XCP includes a Linux binary for NFS data sets and a windows executable for SMB data sets.

NetApp XCP File Analytics is host-based software that detects file shares, runs scans on the file system, and provides a dashboard for file analytics. XCP File Analytics is compatible with both NetApp and non-NetApp systems and runs on Linux or Windows hosts to provide analytics for NFS and SMB-exported file systems.

NetApp ONTAP FlexGroup Volumes

A training dataset can be a collection of potentially billions of files. Files can include text, audio, video, and other forms of unstructured data that must be stored and processed to be read in parallel. The storage system must store large numbers of small files and must read those files in parallel for sequential and random I/O.

A FlexGroup volume is a single namespace that comprises multiple constituent member volumes, as shown in the following figure. From a storage administrator viewpoint, a FlexGroup volume is managed and acts like a NetApp FlexVol volume. Files in a FlexGroup volume are allocated to individual member volumes and are not striped across volumes or nodes. They enable the following capabilities:

  • FlexGroup volumes provide multiple petabytes of capacity and predictable low latency for high-metadata workloads.

  • They support up to 400 billion files in the same namespace.

  • They support parallelized operations in NAS workloads across CPUs, nodes, aggregates, and constituent FlexVol volumes.

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