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ONTAP 9 release highlights

Contributors netapp-ahibbard
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Each release of the ONTAP 9 data management software delivers new and enhanced features that improve the capabilities, manageability, performance, and security offerings in ONTAP.

In addition to these highlights, you can find comprehensive, per-version coverage of all the new and enhanced features introduced in recent ONTAP releases.

For details about hardware platform and switch support, known issues, and limitations in all ONTAP 9 versions, or for features introduced in releases prior to ONTAP 9.9.1, refer to the ONTAP 9 Release Notes. You must sign in with your NetApp account or create an account to access the Release Notes.

To upgrade to the latest release of ONTAP, see Upgrade to the latest version of ONTAP and When should I upgrade ONTAP?

ONTAP 9.14.1 highlights

ONTAP 9.14.1 delivers new and enhanced features in the areas of FabricPool, anti-ransomware protection, OAuth, and more. For a complete list of new features and enhancements, see What's new in ONTAP 9.14.1.

  • WAFL reservation reduction

    ONTAP 9.14.1 introduces an immediate five percent increase in usable space on FAS and Cloud Volumes ONTAP systems by reducing the WAFL reserve on aggregates with 30 TB or more.

  • FabricPool enhancements

    FabricPool offers an increase in read performance and enables direct writing to the cloud, lowering the risk of running out of space and reducing storage costs by moving cold data to a less expensive storage tier.

  • Support for OAuth 2.0

    ONTAP supports the OAuth 2.0 framework, which can be configured using System Manager. With OAuth 2.0, you can provide secure access to ONTAP for automation frameworks without creating or exposing user IDs and passwords to plain text scripts and runbooks.

  • Autonomous Ransomware Protection (ARP) enhancements

    ARP grants you more control over event security, allowing you to adjust the conditions that create alerts and reducing the possibility for false positives.

  • SnapMirror disaster recovery rehearsal in System Manager

    System Manager provides a simple workflow to easily test disaster recovery at a remote location and to clean up after the test. This feature enables easier and more frequent testing and increased confidence in recovery time objectives.

  • S3 object lock support

    ONTAP S3 supports the object-lock API command, enabling you to protect data written to ONTAP with S3 from deletion using standard S3 API commands and to ensure that important data is protected for the appropriate amount of time.

  • Cluster and volume tagging

    Add metadata tags to volumes and clusters, which follow the data as it moves from on-premises to the cloud and reverse.

ONTAP 9.13.1 highlights

ONTAP 9.13.1 delivers new and enhanced features in the areas of anti-ransomware protection, consistency groups, quality of service, tenant capacity management, and more. For a complete list of new features and enhancements, see What's new in ONTAP 9.13.1.

  • Autonomous Ransomware Protection (ARP) enhancements:

    • Automatic enablement

      With ONTAP 9.13.1, ARP automatically moves from training into production mode after it has sufficient learning data, eliminating the need for an administrator to enable it after the 30-day period.

    • Multi-admin verification support

      ARP disable commands are supported by multi-admin verification, ensuring that no single administrator can disable ARP to expose the data to potential ransomware attacks.

    • FlexGroup support

      ARP supports FlexGroups beginning with ONTAP 9.13.1. ARP can monitor and protect FlexGroups that span multiple volumes and nodes in the cluster, enabling even the largest datasets to be protected with ARP.

  • Performance and capacity monitoring for consistency groups in System Manager

    Performance and capacity monitoring provides detailed for each consistency group, enabling you to quickly identify and report potential issues at the application level rather than just at the data object level.

  • Tenant capacity management

    Multi-tenant customers and service providers can set a capacity limit on each SVM, allowing tenants to perform self-service provisioning without the risk of one tenant over-consuming capacity on the cluster.

  • Quality of Service ceilings and floors

    ONTAP 9.13.1 allows you to group objects such as volumes, LUNs, or files into groups and assign a QoS ceiling (maximum IOPs) or floor (minimum IOPs), improving application performance expectations.

ONTAP 9.12.1 highlights

ONTAP 9.12.1 delivers new and enhanced features in the areas of security hardening, retention, performance, and more. For a complete list of new features and enhancements, see What's new in ONTAP 9.12.1.

  • Tamper-proof Snapshots

    With SnapLock technology, Snapshot copies can be protected from deletion on either the source or destination.

    Retain more recovery points by protecting snapshots on primary and secondary storage from deletion by ransomware attackers or rogue administrators.

  • Autonomous ransomware protection (ARP) enhancements

    Immediately enable intelligent autonomous ransomware protection on secondary storage, based on the screening model already completed for the primary storage.

    After a failover, instantly identify potential ransomware attacks on secondary storage. A Snapshot is immediately taken of the data that is starting to be affected, and administrators are notified, helping to stop an attack and enhance recovery.

  • FPolicy

    One-click activation of ONTAP FPolicy to enable automatic blocking of known malicious files The simplified activation helps to protect against typical ransomware attacks that use common, known file extensions.

  • Security hardening: Tamper-proof retention logging

    Tamperproof retention logging in ONTAP insuring compromised administrator accounts cannot hide malicious actions. Admin and user history cannot be altered or deleted without the systems knowledge.

    Log and audit all admin actions regardless of origin guaranteeing all actions impacting data are captured. An alert is generated whenever system audit logs have been tampered with in any way notifying administrators of the change.

  • Security hardening: Expanded multifactor authentication

    Multifactor authentication (MFA) for CLI (SSH) supports Yubikey physical hardware token devices ensuring that an attacker cannot access the ONTAP system using stolen credentials or a compromised client system. Cisco DUO is supported for MFA with System Manager.

  • File-object duality (multi-protocol access)

    File-object duality enables native S3 protocol read and write access to the same data source that already has NAS protocol access. You can concurrently access your storage as files or as objects from the same data source, eliminating the need for duplicate copies of data for use with different protocols (S3 or NAS), such as for analytics that use object data.

  • FlexGroup rebalancing

    If FlexGroup constituents become unbalanced, FlexGroup can nondisruptively be rebalanced and managed from the CLI, REST API, and System Manager. For optimal performance, constituent members within a FlexGroup should have their used capacity evenly distributed.

  • Storage capacity enhancements

    WAFL Space Reservation has been significantly reduced, providing up to 400 TiB more usable capacity per aggregate.

ONTAP 9.11.1 highlights

ONTAP 9.11.1 delivers new and enhanced features in the areas of security, retention, performance, and more. For a complete list of new features and enhancements, see What's new in ONTAP 9.11.1.

  • Multi-admin verification

    Multi-admin verification (MAV) is an industry-first native approach to verification, requiring multiple approvals for sensitive administrative tasks such as deleting a Snapshot or volume. The approvals required in a MAV implementation prevent malicious attacks and accidental changes to data.

  • Enhancements to Autonomous Ransomware Protection

    Autonomous Ransomware Protection (ARP) uses machine learning to detect ransomware threats with increased granularity, enabling you to identify threats quickly and accelerate recovery in the event of a breach.

  • SnapLock Compliance for FlexGroup volumes

    Secure multi-petabyte datasets for workloads such as electronic design automation and media & entertainment by protecting the data with WORM file locking so it cannot be changed or deleted.

  • Asynchronous directory delete

    With ONTAP 9.11.1, file deletion occurs in the background of the ONTAP system, enabling you to easily delete large directories while eliminating performance and latency impacts on the host I/O.

  • S3 enhancements

    Simplify and expand the object data management capabilities of S3 with ONTAP with additional API endpoints and object versioning at the bucket level, enabling multiple versions of an object to be stored in the same bucket.

  • System Manager enhancements

    System Manager supports advanced capabilities to optimize storage resources and improve audit management. These updates include enhanced abilities to manage and configure storage aggregates, enhanced visibility into system analytics, hardware visualization for FAS systems.

ONTAP 9.10.1 highlights

ONTAP 9.10.1 delivers new and enhanced features in the areas of security hardening, performance analytics, NVMe protocol support, and object storage backup options. For a complete list of new features and enhancements, see What's new in ONTAP 9.10.1.

  • Autonomous Ransomware Protection

    Autonomous Ransomware Protection automatically creates a Snapshot copy of your volume and alerts administrators when abnormal activity is detected, enabling you to quickly detect ransomware attacks and recover more quickly.

  • System Manager enhancements

    System Manager automatically download firmware updates for disks, shelves, service processors in addition to providing new integrations with NetApp Active IQ Digital Advisor, BlueXP, and certificate management. These enhancements simplify administration and maintain business continuity.

  • File System Analytics enhancements

    File System Analytics provides additional telemetry to identify top files, directories, and users in your file share, enabling you to identify workload performance issues to improve resource planning and implementation of QoS.

  • NVMe over TCP (NVMe/TCP) support for AFF systems

    Achieve high performance and reduce TCO for your enterprise SAN and modern workloads on AFF system when you use NVMe/TCP on your existing Ethernet network.

  • NVMe over Fibre Channel (NVMe/FC) support for NetApp FAS systems

    Use the NVMe/FC protocol on your hybrid arrays to enable uniform migration to NVMe.

  • Native hybrid cloud backup for object storage

    Protect your ONTAP S3 data with your choice of object storage targets. Use SnapMirror replication to back up to on-premises storage with StorageGRID, to the cloud with Amazon S3, or to another ONTAP S3 bucket on NetApp AFF and FAS systems.

  • Global file-locking with FlexCache

    Ensure file consistency at cache locations during updates to source files at the origin with global file-locking using FlexCache. This enhancement enables exclusive file-read locks in an origin-to-cache relationship for workloads that require enhanced locking.

ONTAP 9.9.1 highlights

ONTAP 9.91.1 delivers new and enhanced features in the areas of storage efficiency, multifactor authentication, disaster recovery, and more. For a complete list of new features and enhancements, see What's new in ONTAP 9.9.1.

  • Enhanced security for CLI remote access management

    Support for SHA512 and SSH A512 password hashing protects administrator account credentials from malicious actors who are trying to gain system access.

  • MetroCluster IP enhancements: support for 8-node clusters

    The new limit is twice as large as the previous one, providing support for MetroCluster configurations and enabling continuous data availability.

  • SnapMirror Business Continuity enhancements

    Offers more replication options for backup and disaster recovery for large data containers for NAS workloads.

  • Increased SAN performance

    Delivers up to four-times higher SAN performance for single LUN applications such as VMware datastores so you can achieve high performance in your SAN environment.

  • New object storage option for hybrid cloud

    Enables use of StorageGRID as a destination for NetApp Cloud Backup Service to simplify and automate the backup of your on-premises ONTAP data.

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