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NetApp Solutions

NetApp Storage Options

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NetApp's FAS (Fabric-Attached Storage), AFF (All Flash FAS), ASA (All SAN Array), and cloud solutions offer a range of features that are highly beneficial for VMware environments including VMware Cloud Foundation and VMware vSphere foundation deployments.

Introduction

These offerings enhance performance, scalability, and data management for the VMware administrator. Additionally, ONTAP is utilized across these platforms, delivering a unified, scalable, and efficient data management solution that supports various storage protocols, enhances data protection, and optimizes performance for diverse workloads.

Common Benefits Across NetApp Platforms

  • VMware Integration: All NetApp platforms offer deep integrations with VMware, enhancing the efficiency of the storage environment. On-premise solutions can leverage plugins, APIs, VAAI, and VASA to improve overall data management while improving versatility of the infrastructure.

  • Cost Optimization and storage efficiencies: Leveraging NetApp storage takes advantage of native efficiency technologies such as deduplication, compression, and thin provisioning, significantly reduce storage consumption and costs while maximizing capacity utilization and performance. Additionally these storage savings result in a reduced burden on compute resources.

  • Unified Data Management: ONTAP provides a single management interface for both on-premises and cloud-based storage, simplifying administration and reducing complexity. This allows for seamless data movement and management across on-premises and cloud environments, providing flexibility and scalability for VMware workloads.

  • Multi-protocol support: ONTAP supports a wide range of storage protocols including NFS, CIFS/SMB, iSCSI, FC and NVMe, allowing organizations to consolidate workloads on a single platform or take advantage of purpose-built SAN offerings without creating data silos.

  • Automation and Orchestration: Support for automation tools like VMware Cloud Foundation Automation (formerly VMware Aria Automation) and integration with Ansible and other automation frameworks streamline operations and reduce administrative overhead.

  • Security: Robust security features, including encryption at rest and in transit, secure multi-tenancy, and role-based access control, ensure that VMware environments remain secure.

  • ONTAP Tools for VMware: NetApp ONTAP tools for VMware provides seamless integration and management capabilities, enabling efficient storage provisioning, data protection, and enhanced performance for VMware environments through a unified and intuitive interface.

  • SnapCenter for VMware vSphere: NetApp SnapCenter for VMware vSphere simplifies and centralizes data protection, backup, and recovery operations for VMware environments, ensuring reliable and efficient management of virtual machine data.

  • High Availability and Resilience: Features like RAID-TEC and RAID-DP provide robust data protection and high availability, critical for VMware environments.

  • Quality of Service (QoS): Allows administrators to set performance guarantees for different VMs, ensuring that critical workloads receive the necessary resources.

Note: NetApp cloud solutions may have features limited by the cloud provider, yet they remain very robust for guest connect and support of native NFS datastores.

NetApp ASA (All SAN Array) Benefits

  • Optimized for SAN: Designed specifically for SAN workloads, providing high performance and low latency for VMware environments that rely on block storage.

  • Enhanced High Availability: Features like active-active controllers and synchronous replication ensure continuous availability and data protection.

The ASA lineup is comprised of both A-Series and C-Series models.

The NetApp A-Series all-NVMe flash arrays are designed for high-performance workloads, offering ultra-low latency and high resiliency, making them suitable for mission-critical applications.

vmware asa image1

C-Series QLC flash arrays are aimed at higher-capacity use cases, delivering the speed of flash with the economy of hybrid flash.

vmware asa image2

Storage Protocol Support

The ASA supports all standard SAN protocols including, iSCSI, Fibre Channel (FC), Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), and NVME over fabrics.

iSCSI - NetApp ASA provides robust support for iSCSI, allowing block-level access to storage devices over IP networks. It offers seamless integration with iSCSI initiators, enabling efficient provisioning and management of iSCSI LUNs. ONTAP's advanced features, such as multi-pathing, CHAP authentication, and ALUA support.

For design guidance on iSCSI configurations refer to the SAN Configuration reference documentation.

Fibre Channel - NetApp ASA offers comprehensive support for Fibre Channel (FC), a high-speed network technology commonly used in storage area networks (SANs). ONTAP seamlessly integrates with FC infrastructure, providing reliable and efficient block-level access to storage devices. It offers features like zoning, multi-pathing, and fabric login (FLOGI) to optimize performance, enhance security, and ensure seamless connectivity in FC environments.

For design guidance on Fibre Channel configurations refer to the SAN Configuration reference documentation.

NVMe over Fabrics - NetApp ONTAP and ASA support NVMe over fabrics. NVMe/FC enables the use of NVMe storage devices over Fibre Channel infrastructure, and NVMe/TCP over storage IP networks.

For design guidance on NVMe refer to NVMe configuration, support and limitations
 

Active-active technology

NetApp All-Flash SAN Arrays allows for active-active paths through both controllers, eliminating the need for the host operating system to wait for an active path to fail before activating the alternative path. This means that the host can utilize all available paths on all controllers, ensuring active paths are always present regardless of whether the system is in a steady state or undergoing a controller failover operation.

Furthermore, the NetApp ASA offers a distinctive feature that greatly enhances the speed of SAN failover. Each controller continuously replicates essential LUN metadata to its partner. As a result, each controller is prepared to take over data serving responsibilities in the event of a sudden failure of its partner. This readiness is possible because the controller already possesses the necessary information to start utilizing the drives that were previously managed by the failed controller.

With active-active pathing, both planned and unplanned takeovers have IO resumption times of 2-3 seconds.

For more information see TR-4968, NetApp All-SAS Array – Data Availability and Integrity with the NetApp ASA.
 

For detailed information see the NetApp ASA landing page.
 

NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS) Benefits

  • Extreme Performance: Utilizes all-flash storage to deliver sub-millisecond latency and high IOPS, ideal for performance-sensitive VMware workloads.

  • Consistent Low Latency: Ensures predictable performance for critical applications and VMs, crucial for maintaining SLAs.

For more information on NetApp AFF A-Series storage arrays see the NetApp AFF A-Series landing page.

For more information on NetApp C-Series storage arrays see the NetApp AFF C-Series landing page.

 

NetApp FAS (Fabric-Attached Storage) Benefits

  • Unified Storage Architecture: Supports both SAN (block-level) and NAS (file-level) protocols, making it versatile for various VMware workloads.

  • Cost-Effective: Ideal for environments that require a balance between performance and cost, offering a combination of HDDs and SSDs.

Cloud Solutions Benefits

  • Cloud-Native Data Management: Utilizes cloud-native offerings to enhance data mobility, backup, and disaster recovery for VMware workloads. Support for native NFS datastore support for VMware cloud workloads is as follows:

    • VMware Cloud on AWS with Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP

    • Azure VMware Service with Azure NetApp Files

    • Google Cloud VMware Engine with Google Cloud NetApp Volume -

  • Hybrid Cloud Flexibility: Seamless integration between on-premises and cloud environments, providing flexibility for VMware workloads that span multiple locations.

Summary

In summary, ONTAP and NetApp platforms offer a comprehensive set of benefits for VMware workloads, enhancing performance, scalability, and data management. While common features provide a solid foundation, each platform offers differentiated benefits tailored to specific needs, whether it's cost-effective storage with FAS, high performance with AFF, optimized SAN performance with ASA, or hybrid cloud flexibility with NetApp cloud offerings.