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ONTAP: The leading unified storage operating system

Power your intelligent data infrastructure with the most extensive feature set, unified data services and protocols supporting a broad range of storage systems to meet any performance and economic need and serve any data to any application, anywhere.

Why ONTAP for comprehensive data management?

Simplify operations, power your data, and derisk operations with the leading unified storage operating system

To get the most out of your data, you need to break down data silos to make it simply accessible, provide the right performance at the right price, and protect it from any threat.

ONTAP helps businesses

  • Simplify operations, eliminate complex data silos, unify management and data services for all your data.
  • Power data to serve any workload at the right price and performance level, anywhere.
  • Protect data from threats both human made and natural, de-risk operations with the most secure and available storage

What's new with ONTAP

The latest ONTAP release includes:

  • SnapMirror active-sync for symmetric active-active data availability across multiple sites
  • FlexCache performance and writeback enhancements to allow distributed and remote teams to work like locals
  • Extensive security enhancements including multi-admin verification expansion and dynamic authorization framework

Key benefits

Power the data that drives your business with the leading unified storage operating system. ONTAP helps you create a storage infrastructure that reduces costs, accelerates critical workloads, and protects and secures data across your hybrid multicloud.

Hit the protection-security-availability trifecta

Wherever your data is, keep it safe, protected, and ready when you need it. Defend against ransomware attacks and security breaches with autonomous protection and a Zero Trust architecture. Deliver the level of data availability that each of your business applications requires.

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Adapt and grow your hybrid cloud as your requirements evolve

Create an agile, future-proof storage environment while reducing TCO across your IT estate, whether on premises, hybrid, or in public clouds. Easily adapt to ever-changing needs and business conditions, and speed up your cloud adoption to meet business demands.

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Eliminate operational chaos and unpredictability

Reduce complexity with a consistent, unified data management environment across your hybrid cloud. Automate operations, streamline business processes, and reduce your overall TCO. Simplify and automate day-to-day activities for staff, so you can shift skilled workers from operational tasks to more strategic projects.

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Performance worthy of lengthy standing ovations

Speed critical workloads with outstanding performance across your hybrid cloud. Plus, deliver predictable performance to all your consolidated applications with quality of service (QoS) minimums and maximums. And scale performance and capacity without disruption.

Small storage footprint, big smiles

Lower storage costs with data reduction technologies that minimize your data footprint. And by automatically tiering cold data to public and private clouds, it's easy to maximize your high-performance storage capacity and lower your overall TCO.

Protect against ransomware attacks

Ransomware is a significant threat to your organization—not only because of the potential loss of data but also from the monetary impact and risk to your company’s reputation. Industry-leading NetApp solutions can help you recover quickly from ransomware attacks and prevent ransomware from spreading in the first place.

  • Reduce risks by increasing ransomware detection and recovery. ONTAP can autonomously create NetApp Snapshot™ copies and alert administrators when it detects abnormal file activity, based on machine learning.
  • Prevent malicious or accidental changes to your data by requiring multiple approvals for key administrative tasks—an industry-first native approach from NetApp
  • Protect against the most common types of ransomware through NetApp FPolicy® file screening solution. Filter based on file extensions and file metadata by using the file-blocking methodology built into FPolicy. Activate it in just one click.
  • Prevent the spread of day zero ransomware attacks by combining FPolicy with third-party partner solutions that enable NetApp ONTAP to leverage user behavioral analytics.
  • In the worst-case scenario, quickly recover with Snapshot™ copies, which can help you avoid downtime and the associated costs of being off line.
  • Further protect your organization by creating immutable, air-gap versions of your Snapshot copies. These versions can't be deleted by compromised administrator accounts, because the copies are fortified with NetApp SnapLock® Compliance software.

Save time for your IT staff: Automation with Ansible

Fast, trusted automation for your day-to-day tasks. Infrastructure in seconds, not minutes or hours, with time to completion that’s over 50 times faster. That’s what you can expect to achieve by automating your ONTAP configuration management with Ansible. The NetApp portfolio of easy-to-use, certified Ansible modules can help you automate and simplify up to 100% of your repetitive day-to-day tasks.

Significantly reduce your all-flash storage costs: Tier cold data to the cloud

All-flash storage is great for delivering consistent, fast response times for critical business data. But when that data is cold and no longer regularly retrieved, it's not optimal to keep it on an all-flash system.

Free up space on your NetApp AFF system by using the innovative capabilities of Cloud Tiering, powered by ONTAP FabricPool technology. Data tiering automatically and seamlessly moves cold data to a lower-cost storage tier, either in the cloud or on premises. You can tier to your choice of the leading cloud providers—AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, or Alibaba. You can also tier to NetApp FAS systems or NetApp StorageGRID®, an on-premises object-based storage solution that's cost effective for deployments larger than 200TB.

You can reduce your primary flash storage needs by more than 50% without compromising performance, efficiency, or protection. Decrease the size of a new AFF system configuration, or reclaim capacity on an existing AFF system and consolidate more workloads on it.

Deliver the business continuity that your organization requires

Your applications likely have different availability requirements, depending on how crucial they are for your business. The comprehensive data protection and business continuity capabilities that are built into ONTAP offer a broad range of solutions to safeguard your operations and keep them running smoothly.

  • Perform local backup and nearly instantaneous recovery by using space-efficient Snapshot copies.
  • Achieve remote backup/recovery and disaster recovery with NetApp SnapMirror® Asynchronous replication.
  • Get zero data loss protection (RPO=0) with SnapMirror Synchronous replication. It's also space efficient, because storage efficiency savings are preserved during and after the synchronous data replication process.
  • Deliver business continuity for your most critical applications by using NetApp MetroCluster technology or SnapMirror Business Continuity replication in your ONTAP environment. These solutions provide continuous data availability by synchronously mirroring data between AFF or FAS systems. The storage arrays can be deployed at a single site, across a metropolitan area, or in different cities. MetroCluster is robust, array-based infrastructure for your SAN and NAS workloads. SnapMirror Business Continuity lets you flexibly consolidate multiple workloads and then choose the most critical SAN applications to support with continuous availability if a data center disaster occurs.

Secure your data with encryption

Protecting your data at rest is crucial for your sensitive information. You can deploy two types of NetApp solutions that deliver FIPS 140-2 AES-256 bit encryption:

  • Hardware-based. NetApp Storage Encryption (NSE) uses self-encrypting drives to provide FIPS 140-2 level 2 compliance.
  • Software-based. NetApp Volume Encryption (NVE) and NetApp Aggregate Encryption (NAE) deliver FIPS 140-2 level 1 compliance by using software-based encryption on any drive type across AFF, FAS, ONTAP Select, and NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP deployments.

You can also deploy both hardware- and software-based encryption simultaneously, providing two layers of protection for your most sensitive data.

Besides encryption, NetApp offers a leading data security portfolio to help you address today’s security threats and requirements for governance, risk, and compliance.

Use Snapshot copies for quick, efficient data protection and dev/test

Snapshot technology underlies an innovative ecosystem of high-availability, disaster-tolerant data-protection solutions for your ONTAP environment. Because Snapshot copies have no performance impact, use minimal storage space, and are safe to deploy on running systems, administrators can maintain frequent, low-impact copies of files, directory hierarchies, LUNs, and application data on a running system.

Snapshot technology significantly improves the frequency and reliability of backups, and it allows near-instantaneous, secure, user-managed restores. Users can directly access Snapshot copies to recover from accidental deletion, corruption, or modification of their data.

Snapshot copies can also be used to instantly create writable clones. You can use these NetApp FlexClone® volumes for development and testing of new business applications and for report generation and analytics. Also, FlexClone volumes don’t consume additional storage space.

Meet your broad requirements for data retention and data compliance

Do you need to retain files to meet regulatory or governance requirements and to support litigation holds and event-based retention?

NetApp SnapLock® technology is designed for these situations. It prevents files from being altered or deleted until a set retention date. SnapLock does this by creating nonrewritable, nonerasable data on hard drives or flash media by using write once, read many (WORM) file locking.

Choose between two deployment options:

  • SnapLock Compliance is certified to meet strict regulatory requirements such as SEC 17a-4(f), HIPAA, FINRA, and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Rule 1.31(b), as well as national requirements for the German-speaking countries (DACH). WORM files using SnapLock Compliance can't be deleted during the retention period.
  • SnapLock Enterprise supports corporate best practices, legal holds, and other requirements not covered by regulatory mandates. WORM files using SnapLock Enterprise can be deleted during the retention period by the compliance administrator, using an audited privileged delete procedure.

SnapLock also can incrementally append files while they remain locked, making it ideal for audio or video surveillance and logging.

Easily clean up data spills and meet GDPR requirements

Do you need better ways to delete confidential data that was placed on an insecure device or moved to an unauthorized location? Just deleting the file isn't sufficient.

Previously, security departments often needed to take away the storage system for days or weeks to resolve data spills. Now, with the secure purge feature in ONTAP, you can remediate data spillage online while the system is in use, significantly decreasing the time and hassle. Third-party testing has proven that it works.

Secure purge completely removes spilled data from the physical media where it was placed, on both HDDs and SSDs. It cryptographically shreds deleted files on NVE volumes by retaining active files and deleting the encryption key used to lock the spilled data.

In addition, secure purge provides a state-of-the-art “right-to-erasure” capability that can help you meet General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requirements.

Test drive: Enterprise application protection in your data fabric with ONTAP

In less than 5 minutes, you can get an up-close, hands-on look at how database backup and space-efficient replication are simplified with ONTAP technology.

GigaOm declares NetApp storage a leader

“NetApp offers a comprehensive set of enterprise-grade capabilities that maintain consistency regardless of deployment model.” – GigaOm

NetApp has achieved a bull’s-eye in primary storage.

Top view of the building with sky in the picture

Edge to core to cloud

ONTAP software provides a rock-solid foundation for data management on the broadest range of deployments. NetApp storage systems, commodity servers, the cloud—ONTAP offers yogi-like flexibility.

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