Auto-tiering and Flex Volumes for Google NetApp Cloud Volumes

 

Google NetApp Cloud Volumes

Google NetApp Cloud Volumes was introduced in August 2023 as the outcome of Google Cloud and NetApp’s engineering cooperation. For businesses wishing to fully leverage the cloud, this fully managed file storage service offers extensive yet user-friendly data management tools that enable great performance and excellent security.

Concerning NetApp Volumes

NetApp Volumes is a fully managed cloud-based data storage solution with highly scalable performance and sophisticated data management features.

With Google NetApp Cloud Volumes, you can manage your workloads and apps more quickly, move workloads to the cloud, and retain the features and performance of on-premises storage.

You may migrate file-based apps to Google Cloud with NetApp Volumes. Because of its built-in support for the Server Message Block (SMB) and Network File System (NFSv3 and NFSv4.1) protocols, you may continue to acquire persistent storage for your applications without having to re-architect them.

Four service levels are available from Google NetApp Cloud Volumes: Flex, Standard, Premium, and Extreme. Service levels differ in terms of capabilities, features, and performance.

They kept up the innovation since the service went live, growing their collaboration and enhancing its features. These are some of the highlights.

Announcing the service level for Flex storage

Google Cloud current Standard, Premium, and Extreme storage service levels are enhanced by the new Google NetApp Cloud Volumes Flex storage service level. You can now build a volume as little as 1GiB, a storage pool as small as 1TiB, and choose between regional storage service levels (99.99% SLA) and zonal storage service levels (99.9% availability SLA). Flex regional is now offered in Preview in seven regions, whereas Flex zonal is typically accessible in fourteen.

Meeting the demands of enterprise workloads

For businesses wishing to migrate VMware applications with a lot of storage to Google Cloud, NetApp Volumes is perfect. With Google NetApp Cloud Volumes‘ recent certification as a Google Cloud VMware Engine datastore, scalability and migration of virtual machines (VMs) can be facilitated more easily. By using volume reshaping and dynamic switching between the Premium and Extreme storage service tiers, you may optimise costs by only paying for the compute and storage nodes that you really utilise.

Furthermore, Google NetApp Cloud Volumes big volumes are currently under preview for customers running demanding workloads like electrical design automation (EDA) or high-performance computing (HPC) simulations. Large volumes are now supported by NetApp Volumes Premium and Extreme service levels, which provide performance of up to 12GiB/s and handle capacities ranging from 100GiB to 1PiB. This is a major improvement over the current Extreme performance level of 4.5GiB/s.

Novel methods for cost optimisation and data protection

NetApp Volumes make it simple to backup your data, and incremental backups can help you preserve it for a longer period of time at a lower cost. This is a supplement to current methods of data protection, such as cross-region volume replication for disaster recovery and snapshot and cloning for temporary data protection. Currently, Standard, Premium, and Extreme service levels can all access volume backups.

Auto-tiering, a new feature of Google NetApp Cloud Volumes, is currently in preview. You can configure a policy to dynamically tier data from Premium or Extreme service levels to cooler storage volumes based on file access frequency (e.g., 7 days, 30 days). The price difference between the cold storage volumes and the Premium storage volumes is about 80%1. You may now optimise your storage expenses with a “set it and forget it” strategy to track the frequency of file accesses when auto-tiering is enabled. There is no need to alter application or user behaviour for any of the data that is stored on the hot or cold tiers; it is all still available via the filesystem.

Appropriate for AI and workloads of the future

Vertex AI, Google Cloud’s machine learning platform, can be accessed through a new toolkit in Google NetApp Cloud Volumes. This platform helps you store, manage, and safeguard your data on the cloud and effortlessly connect it to Google Cloud compute capabilities to power generative AI and large language models (LLMs).

You may now access unstructured, multimodal data, such as text, audio, video, and photos, that was previously unobtainable with Google NetApp Cloud Volumes and Vertex AI. This data can be used to support scientific research, creative projects, and corporate problem-solving. Additionally, NetApp Volumes give Vertex AI applications extra levels of data security and privacy.

Consumers and analysts are paying attention

Customers who use Google NetApp Cloud Volumes to manage cloud data while lowering storage costs, enhancing performance, and fortifying data security and protection have responded incredibly well.

“Akumin, a pioneer in oncology and radiology solutions globally, relies on cutting-edge technology to provide optimal patient care. We choose Google NetApp Cloud Volumes because it is a centralised solution centrally administered from the Google Cloud panel, offering the functionality and performance Google Cloud require in a completely integrated system. We set up our storage and spun up volumes with ease, and we felt safer knowing that our data architecture was intelligent and safe thanks to NetApp and Google Cloud technologies. – Afsaan Kermani, Akumin’s Vice President of IT

Research examining the worth and advantages of adopting NetApp Cloud Volumes for Google Cloud for enterprises is presented in IDC’s “The Business Value of NetApp Cloud Volumes for Google Cloud” report.

More complicated workloads that need for enterprise-level management are being moved across on-premises, hybrid cloud, and multicloud systems. Companies who wish to extend workload capabilities with cutting-edge cloud services while leveraging their current technology and expertise investments find partnerships like NetApp’s and Google Cloud’s appealing. “Research Vice President, Cloud and Edge Infrastructure Services, IDC,” Dave McCarthy

Google Cloud is eager to work with NetApp going forward and anticipate more advancements as a result of Google Cloud’s alliance.