The latest buzz word is “cloud”. Lets understand the latest offering from netapp on cloud. Netapp leverages their operating system ” ontap” to cloud called ontap cloud.
I am trying to keep things simple here as there would be new terminologies discussed about AWS ( Amazon web services) when we talk about ontap cloud. Will try to explain those in braces as I go through the topic.
ONTAP Cloud is a virtual machine version of Data ONTAP that is designed to run on top of Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) compute instances. The cloud vendor which we refer here will be AWS( Amazon web services) we also have support for microsoft Azure and Azure would be beyond the scope of discussion here.
Let me explain that in detail here. Ontap cloud is just like our ontap simulator which we used to deploy it on a server. The only difference is that we deploy this on cloud.
Here we would be deploying ontap on an EC2 instance( this is just a vm on cloud)
For deploying ontap cloud we will have to search ontap cloud on the AWS marketplace. ( this is just like our google playstore where we search for apps). ontap cloud can only be installed on EC2 instances only. EC2 instances are available in different types. T micro to Rxlarge. T micro instances are those will lesser CPU and memory. Rxlarge are those instances which are memory optimized with larger memory. Rxlarge is the instance which Netapp is recommending for the deployment of ontap cloud.
Ontap cloud instances can be managed by cloud manager. Cloud manager is a management interface for hybrid cloud storage environment, including ONTAP Cloud and clustered Data ONTAP based platforms.
Cloud manager can be either deployed onprem or can be hosted on cloud. If you are cost centric you can deploy the cloud manager on premises. If we deploy it on AWS, it would require additional T2 micro instance to be deployed on cloud and that would incur cost. Please find the high level overview of the ontap cloud. If we see closely all of the storage efficiency technologies( dedupe/thinprovision/flexclone/compression are supported in ontap cloud.
Ontap cloud instance is a licensed from netapp, there are three types of licences,
- Standard hourly Licence
- Pay as you go
- BYOL ( Bring your own license)
if we already have ontap cloud license which you have got from the netapp partner you can go for the BYOL else you can go for the standard or pay as you go license.
Ontap cloud has a single node, or can be configured for HA pair. When configured for a HA pair we will have to select different availability zones for different nodes for better resiliency as thats the essential in case of a disaster strikes a particular zone. Please find the diagram which explains the same for HA pair ontap cloud.
Ontap cloud HA has two pairs of ontap cloud instances on AWS, they will form a metrocluster configuration there by maintaining high availability. we also have one more node called mediator instance which will be the heart beat for both the nodes. where in one node fails and the other takes over. We can use a T2 micro instance for the mediator node.
Use cases of ontap cloud.
We can have a snapmirror DR from onprem filer to ontap cloud.
We can have a cloud metrocluster configuration using HA configuration. contd…
SAN bits 