Chapter 1: What is the focus of ONTAP 9.2 and its new features?
This episode of the Tech on Tap podcast, we talk with NetApp's chief evangelist, Jeff Baxter, about ONTAP 9.2.
Welcome to the Tech on Tap podcast.
Hello and welcome to the Tech On Tap podcast. My name is Justin Parisi and in the studio with me today is the indisputable Glenn Sizemore. Hi, Glenn. How you doing, Justin? Doing great. We have a very special episode for you today. It's actually episode two of a three-episode week. It's a trifecta. It's release week here. It is release week.
So we decided we were going to do multiple releases in light of being out of the loop the last two weeks. So Monday, we kicked it off with the Storage Grid web scale 10.4 release. Thursday, May 11th, we're doing the ONTAP 9.2 release, which is this show. And then Friday, we'll be picking it up with Veeam's 9.5 update 2 release. To talk about the ONTAP 9.2 release, we brought in Mr. Jeff Baxter.
He's going to tell you all about what he does here at NetApp and how to get in touch with him on social media. Hi, Jeff.
Thanks for having me. Sounds like you're going to be going to daily podcasts pretty soon here. We can start releasing ONTAP daily. You can do a podcast daily. It'll all work out.
Yeah, yeah. I got nothing better to do. This is true.
This is true. I mean, while we're saying true, that's right. This is Jeff Baxter. I'm the chief evangelist for ONTAP here at NetApp. I've been here about nine years. Wow. Most of that time actually spent out in the field, culminating with a stint as CTO for the Americas.
And then they asked me roughly about eight months ago to hop over to our product operations group where I help sort of drive strategy for each of the releases and drive messaging as to what we're doing in each of those releases.
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Chapter 2: How does the six-month release cadence impact ONTAP updates?
Before we do that, my understanding is you're in Las Vegas right now for Converge?
I am in Las Vegas for Converge. Converge is the new name for what we've traditionally called sales kickoff, right? So the new NetApp fiscal year starts in May. And we have basically our entire global sales team and systems engineering team out here this year to learn about a lot of the new things that are coming from NetApp. Among them, obviously, is ONTAP 9.2 coming out as planned this week.
I'm helping educate the team on all the new stuff in that release.
Yep, and this has a point, trust me. And then in November timeframe, we also have Insight, right? Correct. So we can talk more about the next release of ONTAP. So that sounds an awful lot like that was planned somehow.
You know, it might have been. The timing seems impeccable. It really does, doesn't it?
All right, Oz, I need you back behind the curtain, all right? Quit giving away all our secrets.
What secrets? So with that said, let's talk about the cadence model and why we do a six-month release.
Sure. Yeah. So starting with OnTap 9.0, we moved to this whole six-month cadence model. Before that, you know, the target was roughly something like 18 months. It might have been longer. It might have been 22 months. It might have been 23 months. Generally, it was, you know, there was always one big feature sort of pulling the train or holding up the train. Yeah.
only when it really got ready to ship, and then there were a couple others, if they were ready to ship, the train finally left the station. And, you know, our CEO, who at the time was running ONTAP and then Product Operations, George Kurian, you know, had a great analogy, which the problem is that the train only leaves the station once every couple years.
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Chapter 3: What is the significance of aggregate inline deduplication in ONTAP 9.2?
Sure. And I will refer people on our website for support policies all laid out. So just in case I misspeak on any aspect of it, that's where the official support policy is. But basically what we got to do was, Candidly for ourselves and our customers and the ecosystem of partners, right?
Because we have to do QA on all our products and then our partners, our technology partners have to QA against those and so forth. It starts to get very tricky if you go from a model where in a five-year span, so typically on our FAS or AFF controllers, you can buy five years of hardware support.
And in those five years, you would typically have, what, two or three or four major releases of ONTAP to all of a sudden having 10 major releases of ONTAP on it. And that does become... Very candidly, that does become a challenge to maintain that full level of support and patches and QA testing and testing against everything else for 10 different simultaneous major releases.
So, the compromise that we made to be quite candid was we want to be do all the QA have every major release come out being a fully production ready version. So I want to be very clear on that. The non LTS versus LTS distinction has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the code. Both of them are absolutely major releases that customers can adopt and enjoy and use with confidence.
However, the sort of even releases like 9.2 are not what we call long-term support releases. So 9.1 was the first long-term support release. 9.3 should be another long-term support release. And that has that sort of traditional multiple years of primary support and then several years of extended support before we would expect you to transition off.
Instead, with 9.2 and other releases, you typically get a full year of what we would call sort of primary support. I forget the exact term for it, but it's generally means we're going to apply bug fixes if there's any sort of problem with it. We're going to do active development on that code line. We're going to get you that release.
After that first year, what you might hear is, if you call into support on an issue about it, we're certainly going to work with you. We're going to try and solve it. If it's some major issue at our discretion, we'll still try and fix it. But what you might hear is, okay, the fix for that is really going to be a 9.3, and in order to consume that fix, we'd like you to go to that.
And I know that that's a major step for some customers. By that point, by the way, 9.3 will have been out for at least six months, right, or longer. So it's not like we're asking people to move to a release that exists already. But that's kind of the difference between non-LTS and LTS is customers who are – consuming these even releases.
I think of them as more innovation customers who, if they're willing to consume every six months, it implies to me that they'd be willing to move to a next version of ONTAP at least within a year, right? It should never be a problem for them because they're consuming every six months anyways.
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Chapter 4: How does Fabric Pool enhance data management in ONTAP 9.2?
It's this ongoing process where for the last two, three years, we've been doubled down on simplicity. And I'll be candid, and I think if you talk to anyone serious about NetApp, we'll be candid about this, right? We added so much to ONTAP over the last decade.
I mean, if you really look at it, the industry's leading number one OS and the SAN and the NAS features and everything we've done with All Flash and everything. I mean, we piled this thing high. We went to the salad bar and added just about everything you would ever need from a storage OS. It's a Dagwood sandwich. Yeah, it's pretty darn big. And in the process, we went from being a toaster.
right to going to a toaster oven so now we're basically we were at short order kitchen status right where you could order just about everything but you had to know the secret menu and you had to know what to ask for and and all sorts of other things so we've taken this multi-year journey and anyone who tells you that oh in the next release everything will be simple of any product not just ours anything right you should you know ignore them and ask them to politely leave your office because it's a lying vendor in front of you right but
What we're on is this journey to go back to simplicity and not just by papering over the complexity of the system and having a nice shiny GUI. That's part of it. We've made tremendous improvements in the GUI. One of the obvious things we did in ONTAP 9.2 is add the ability to to pan the cluster directly within system manager, right?
As a clustered scale out OS, that would seem to be an important thing to be able to do. So that's the non-type 9.2. So there are all those important things we've done within the GUI and those are critical, but it's more about baking simplicity directly into the system with the things that we'll talk more about during the session, but, you know, balanced one placement,
application-based provisioning of workloads, expanding QoS minimums as well. All of these things are really about taking it away from having to manage individual storage objects down at the LUN level and the volume level and all those different things, and try and manage things based more upon service level objectives and SLAs. Whether or not you're tying that into orchestration, right?
We all know that most of our large enterprises now, people are not creating individualized storage objects, right? Everything's orchestrated through some sort of framework. But whether you're doing that through an orchestration framework or whether you are actually creating individual storage artifacts directly on storage, that simplification works in both cases.
It's either the policy in the GUI that lets you go in and set up your applications by SLO, or it's the API and the interface that lets your overall orchestration engine go in and call those exact same sort of features to deploy things the right way on the storage without having to instruct every orchestration engine on the face of the planet about how to set up ONTAP properly.
So that investment in simplicity is very, very real. A tremendous amount of engineering resources that are being spent just basically scrubbing everything that we do and making it both simple to consume from a end user facing sort of GUI perspective and API perspective, but also making it actually simpler in the system and built into the DNA of ONTAP so it can be orchestrated from anywhere.
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Chapter 5: What improvements have been made to ONTAP Select in version 9.2?
Um, to really help in a lot of ways, restrict performance of individual apps. And so you could kind of balance out your system if you wanted to go apply QS maximums to everything and apply policy groups to everything. And it was good if.
Um, you know, especially if you're a service provider or active, like a service provider, your internal customers, and you wanted to provide an individual application or set of storage objects, you know, they paid for. 30,000 IOPS, and then we're going to get 30,000 IOPS, right? So it was pretty good for that.
And you could at the same time kind of restrict runaway processes or bully processes if you knew about them in advance and you knew what their performance was supposed to be and you had all your service levels set up properly, you could go ahead and restrict them down. But it's kind of like what you're really trying to do is protect your business critical workloads.
That's an interesting way of doing it. It's almost a backwards way of doing it, right? Look at everything else on the system and just try and put caps on it so that you have enough space left for your critical workloads. So in 9.2, we introduced the second half to the equation, which is QoS minimums. I will state up front, there are a couple limitations on it, at least to start.
It's available just for our AFF platforms. That's our all-flash fads. It's available for SAN just to start, which, let's be very clear, none of us are jumping up and down happy about that. Those are time-to-market considerations of when we can get things out and when we can QA them. Going back to the cadence model for a second, I think you can actually expect to see this more from NetApp
Um, where if something's ready and it's not ready on everything, our intent is going to be to have it ready on everything. And we will get there with successive releases, but we're not going to hold something because we know that six months down the line, we get another shot to do it. So in this particular case, we were able to qualify it on all flash bags.
That's typically where our customers are moving to for business critical workloads anyways, and we were able to qualify for San. And while there's certainly business critical workloads that run on NAS and I'm a, um, you know, NAS fan boy at heart myself.
Um, it's, it's fair to say that our absolutely mission critical apps at, at the majority of our customers are typically running on sand and we've had tremendous. Tremendous growth in the sand market over the last couple of years, actually the fastest growing sand vendor out there. So it just made sense to target this in nine dot two first.
We certainly intended a future release to follow on with that mass support and with support on hopefully platforms beyond AFS. So nine dot two, you can go in and set a policy group and on your given a LUN or a volume with LUNs, you can go ahead and set a, just like it says, a minimum IOPS.
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Chapter 6: What are the benefits of using QoS minimums in ONTAP 9.2?
If you have a QS minimums, we're going to provide that, you know, We're going to provide generally that sub millisecond latency to those workloads at the IOPs and restrict any pain from them.
In fact, the higher the floor you set, the higher the QoS minimum you set, the more weight we're going to give to delivering on that QoS minimum and shift all the pain of overburdening the system onto any of the workloads that are not protected. Does that make sense at least?
It does. It does. The only follow on that I would have that I didn't hear addressed in that is, I mean, and I guess this is almost a yes or no. I don't need you to actually get into the numbers because this may be something that we don't want to publicly advertise on the Internet. But it does when I buy an A300, right?
is there a number inside ONTAP that says this platform is capable of X or how does it figure out what that minimum is, right? Because if I give it 12 SSDs, it has a less, the pool is smaller than if I give it 24 of them. right?
I mean, to a certain extent, the controllers absolutely have bottlenecks, but because this isn't SolidFire, this is FAS and AFF, I can build dynamic systems that scale to the customer. How is ONTAP dynamically building what that minimum pool is?
Yeah, so at some point, you're going a little past my understanding of it. What I do know, and I'll tell you what I do know, is that it is a dynamically generated statistic, basically. It is a dynamically generated metric. So when ONTAP goes in, when ONTAP 9 goes in, it knows what's attached to its system. It knows what the workloads are on top of it.
And so that number is not some sort of hard-coded thing in there. Like if you're an A300, your headroom number is X, right? Or your optimal point is X. Instead, it's more, I'm an A300 with this many workloads on. They're ramping at this rate. This is what I'm predictably performing at. And you're sort of self-diagnosing yourself, right? It's kind of like, I'm running this marathon.
This is how my body is feeling. This is the pace I've been at. So based upon prior experience and knowing what my body is capable of, I'll be able to finish this marathon in X minutes or I have this much capacity left in me, right? It's not hard-coded. It's dynamically generated.
On the QoS minimum, the one thing I will mention that's kind of cool is I did mention it's built into the entire system. And basically what we do is prioritization. We know as every workload enters the system, if it has a QoS minimum, And what the priority is, and we essentially set a kind of deadline to that individual IO or that individual message.
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Chapter 7: How does ONTAP 9.2 address storage efficiency and deduplication?
You can still take those sort of like tier zero and tier one workloads and make sure the trains run on time.
That's awesome, man. Thanks for taking us on a deep dive. And don't worry about the questions you couldn't answer. I think that that was more than enough for our audience. Yeah, absolutely. If they want more, we can always... No worries.
We can always get somebody on here to talk about... You know, the thing I...
You know, the thing I hate more than anything is someone from a vendor pretending and making up answers when they don't know the question. There's so much in ONTAP that even if you're in it day in and day out, right, I'd rather get back to your listeners with more information than make something up, right?
That is a good way to get welcome back. Yeah. Making stuff up is a good way to not come back. Yes.
Well, good. Wait, in that case, I'd like to tell you about the following five things I don't know.
All right.
Let's hear it. Oh, wait. You meant that as a disincentive. I'm sorry.
Speaking of the things you don't know. Oh, yeah. So we talked about some performance efficiencies here. Okay. That's what I like to call them because I want to really lead into the next thing. Storage efficiencies, they probably weren't really performance efficiencies. You're going to bury the lead on us, aren't you? I'm going to bury it.
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Chapter 8: What future developments can we expect for ONTAP and Fabric Pool?
But yeah, in the first release, inline.
So walk us through some of the value prop behind why someone would really care about inline aggregate dedupe if they don't know about it.
Well, so it does provide additional savings on multiple different workloads, right? Obviously, you know, virtual workloads, it depends upon how you provision things out, and you guys are probably even more familiar with this than I am, but, you know, there's certainly workloads like VDI where if you're actually going through and patching your VMs,
and they're across multiple different data stores, you're pushing essentially the same patches into every data store. Being able to inline capture those patches is probably the most obvious and clean example of where it's going to provide traditional, a huge amount of savings, right?
Because we've always done sort of, always, I shouldn't say always, but over the last year or two, we've been able to capture them as they went to each data store. But then when you move on to data store number two, Assuming it's in a different volume, right? You're capturing at least one new iteration of that patch, if not more.
And so on a VDI deployment or even in just standard virtual infrastructure with Windows patching or whatever, we're already starting to see some savings there. And, you know, I'll be honest, it's one something everyone's been asking for for a long time. And on the other side, it's just another sort of cog in this overall process for us of of data efficiency.
So we still do, you know, inline zero removal, right? We still do inline data at the volume level. And then we check to see across the aggregate level. We still do compression. We still do compaction. So what you're going to start to see as you work with your NetApp team is we're going to help you size it. And based upon your workloads, we'll do our sizing and our internal tools.
And we'll look at what your system is able to do. And we'll say, okay, if you did this in 9.1, you would get, you know, 3.2 to 1, and if you did this with aggregate inline dedupe, you might get 3.9 to 1, just as an example, right? It's just going to continue to add on to the ways that we can shave off more duplicative data in the system and return more space back to our customers, right?
That's the whole goal for all of our storage efficiency technologies, and this is just a, albeit very important, this is just another cog that goes seamlessly into that entire process that works automatically to basically reduce duplicative data across the system.
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