What is NetAPP ? How to use it ? Why Should i use NetAPP?

Question

I am very new to NetAPP. As per my understanding, netapp is the storage provider company and ontap is the operating system supported for netapp hardwares.

Can i use NetAPP like a virtual instance in AWS or GCP ? If yes how can i create netapp instace on different cloud platforms like GCP or AWS?

Or it is like a NFS drive that we can attach to our existing virtual instance? If yes, can i attach that as a disk or i'll need to use any SDK to call netapp ?

Answer 1

There are a couple of flavors of NetApp that work with AWS:

• FSx For NetApp ONTAP (FSxN)
  • This is a managed service provided by AWS.
• Cloud Volumes ONTAP (CVO)
  • This is where you run ONTAP on an EC2 instance.

The main difference between the two, are that CVO gives you total control over the ONTAP environment, including upgrades and maintenance hours, whereas FSxN, only gives you partial control. CVO is typically used by people who are already NetApp customers who are looking to move to the cloud. Whereas FSxN is geared more towards people who just need an enterprise level NFS or CIFS filesystem, or iSCSI block device, without having to manage the infrastructure that provides it.

Both FSxN and CVO provide these "Enterprise level" features:

• Deduplication
• Compression
• Life cycle tiering to an S3 bucket
• Cloning
• Replication that preserves the efficiencies listed above.
• Snapshots
  • Including immutable snapshots
• Multi protocol support (i.e. access the same files via CIFS or NFS at the same time)
• Integration with a storage portal (BlueXP) that allows you to manage your entire storage portfolio. Both on-prem and all the major hyperscaler (AWS, Azure, and GCP).

Answer 2

Netapp volumes are NFS mounts. You can mount them like any other NFS export. No need for any Netapp specific SDK.

Netapp volumes can now be created natively inside AWS. Check out Amazon FSx for Netapp ONTAP. This workshop teaches you how to deploy one and much more