Tiery-eyed NetApp previews on-prem storage and cloud tie-up

NetApp has previewed a FabricPool technology which combines on-premises and AWS cloud storage into a single repository.

This is part of NetApp's overall Data fabric strategy of converging and integrating on-premises storage with the public cloud.

Joe Caradonna, senior technical director at NetApp, presented Fabric Pool at NetApp’s Insight event in Las Vegas this week. The concept is straightforward: high-access rate or hot data is stored on-premises in a NetApp ONTAP array’s flash drives. When the data’s access rate slows sufficiently it is automatically migrated to a capacity-optimised storage tier.

This could be AWS’ S3 object storage service or NetApp’s own StorageGRID.

Caradonna said FabricPool will be coming to ONTAP Cloud, All-flash FAS, and ONTAP Select. We can envisage an on-premises AFF array running ONTAP tiering data off to ONTAP Cloud running in AWS, and using the S3 protocol to squirt data back and forth. ONTAP Select is the software-only version of ONTAP, and is a development of ONTAP Edge.

The technique of having tiering between on-premises file storage and the Amazon cloud or object storage already exists with Avere and also with Quantum’s StorNext with its cloud tier and Lattus object storage.

StorNext is used primarily in the entertainment and media industry with, for example, video workflows, but is expanding out of that. Avere also has an entertainment and media presence but is more general purpose in nature.

We imagine FabricPool technology might surface as a product sometime in early 2017. ®

Bootnote Avere founder and CEO Ron Bianchini ran and sold Spinnaker to NetApp back in 2004. Spinnaker technology was used to developed Clustered ONTAP, the current ONTAP product. What goes around comes around.