33 Facts About ONTAP

Data ONTAP GX was based on grid technology acquired from Spinnaker Networks.

Data ONTAP 8 includes two distinct operating modes held on a single firmware image.

NetApp storage arrays use highly customized hardware and the proprietary ONTAP operating system, both originally designed by NetApp founders David Hitz and James Lau specifically for storage-serving purposes.

ONTAP is NetApp's internal operating system, specially optimized for storage functions at both high and low levels.

Data ONTAP was made available for commodity computing servers with x86 processors, running atop VMware vSphere hypervisor, under the name "ONTAP Edge".

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Later ONTAP Edge was renamed to ONTAP Select and KVM was added as a supported hypervisor.

Data ONTAP, including WAFL, was developed in 1992 by David Hitz, James Lau, and Michael Malcolm.

ONTAP OS contains several storage efficiencies, which are based on WAFL functionalities.

One or multiple RAID groups form an "aggregate", and within aggregates ONTAP operating system sets up "flexible volumes" to store data that users can access.

Uniqueness of NetApp's Clustered ONTAP is in the ability to add heterogeneous systems to a single cluster.

SDS versions of ONTAP do not support FC, FCoE or NVMeoF protocols due to their software-defined nature.

All of ONTAP's disks have an ownership marker written to them to reflect which controller in the HA pair owns and serves each individual disk.

ONTAP assigns dedicated, non-sharable HA ports for HA interconnect which could be external or build in chassis.

ONTAP Cluster is formed out of one or few HA pairs and adds to ONTAP system Non-Disruptive Operations functionality such as non-disruptive online data migration across nodes in the cluster and non-disruptive hardware upgrade.

Data migration for NDO operations in ONTAP Cluster require dedicated Ethernet ports for such operations called as cluster interconnect and does not use HA interconnect for this purposes.

ONTAP Cluster managed with a single pane of glass built-in management with Web-based GUI, CLI and API.

ONTAP Cluster provides Single Name Space for NDO operations through SVM.

Single Namespace in ONTAP system is a name for collection of techniques used by Cluster to separate data from front-end network connectivity with data protocols like FC, FCoE, FC-NVMe, iSCSI, NFS and CIFS and therefore provide kind of data virtualization for online data mobility across cluster nodes.

Node management LIF interface can migrate with associated IP address across Ethernet ports of a single node and available only while ONTAP running on the node, usually located on e0M port of the node; Node management IP sometimes used by cluster admin to communicate with a node to cluster shell in rare cases where commands have to be issued from a particular node.

ONTAP provide two techniques for Multi Tenancy functionality like Storage Virtual Machines and IP Spaces.

The FlexGroup feature in ONTAP 9 allows to massively scale in a single namespace to over 20PB with over 400 billion files, while evenly spreading the performance across the cluster.

Later versions of ONTAP introduced cascading replication, where one volume could replicate to another, and then another, and so on.

Auditing for NAS events is another security measure in ONTAP that enables the customer to track and log certain CIFS and NFS events on the storage system.

ONTAP accessed over SSH has an ability to Authenticate with a Common Access Card.

ONTAP systems allow storing encryption keys on a USB drive connected to the appliance.

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MTU black-hole detection and path MTU discovery is the processes by which the ONTAP system connected via an Ethernet network detects maximum MTU size.

ONTAP systems have the ability to integrate with Hadoop TeraGen, TeraValidate and TeraSort, Apache Hive, Apache MapReduce, Tez execution engine, Apache Spark, Apache HBase, Azure HDInsight and Hortonworks Data Platform Products, Cloudera CDH, through NetApp In-Place Analytics Module to provide access and analyze data by using external shared NAS storage as primary or secondary Hadoop storage.

On each platform, ONTAP uses the same kernel and a slightly different set of features.

Software-defined versions of ONTAP have nearly all the functionality except for Hardware-centric features like ifgroups, service processor, physical disk drives with encryption, MetroCluster over FCP, Fiber Channel protocol.

ONTAP Deploy is a virtual machine that provides a mediator function in MetroCluster or 2-node configurations, keeps track of licensing, and used to initial cluster deployment.

Cloud Volumes ONTAP includes nearly the same functionality as ONTAP Select, because it is a virtual storage appliance and can be ordered in hyper-scale providers such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

Cloud Volumes ONTAP can provide high availability of data across different regions in the cloud.

Cloud Volumes ONTAP leverages RAID data protection on SSD and HDD drive level with underlying IP SAN storage system in Cloud Provider.