Multisite S3 object storage with ONTAP

[yoshz]

Hello, my customer has NetApp FAS clusters in multiple sites and looking into S3 object storage that automatically replicates to different sites.

Currently we are running a PoC of a Ceph cluster running in each site with multisite synchronization configured (1 zonegroup and 1 zone for each site).

However running Ceph on top of a NetApp FAS cluster adds an additional layer of disk management and complexity.

I have looked into other solutions like:

1. StorageGRID seems to be multisite object storage but it looks like it is meant to run on dedicated hardware and not on a FAS cluster like Ceph.
2. ONTAP FabricPool supports cloud tiers for cold data but doesn't seem to support to replicate to a different ONTAP FabricPool cluster.
3. ONTAP 9.7 add S3 support as public preview but it doesn't seem to support multisite replication and it is unclear if it will be added in the future.

Can you guys help me pointing the best solution without purchasing new hardware?

We are not looking for moving into the cloud (yet).

[keitha]

Hi,

StorageGrid is still your best bet here. It can run in a containerized environment or as VMs either of which can have FAS storage behind the covers. It is much much more robust than Ceph and the best part is you can mix VMs and appliances. That means later you could buy appliances to add to the grid and free up your FAS storage. 

[paul_stejskal]

You can replicate via SnapMirror to another site where the DR side has a FabricPool. ONTAP supports multiple tenants for S3 providers too in 9.7. I'm not sure what the ask is here? Maybe I'm missing something. I'm not familiar with Ceph so that may be what I am missing.