If you’ve been keeping an eye on NetApp over the past week, you’ve seen how we’re putting AI front and center with disaggregated ONTAP for AFX, powering a faster, more secure, and more efficient AI data pipeline. But that’s just the beginning. We’re also making it simpler to manage, protect, and scale your ONTAP data across environments. These latest updates reflect our commitment to building smarter infrastructure, not just to support AI, but to strengthen ONTAP for every workload. ONTAP 9.17.1: raising the bar for secure, resilient, and efficient data infrastructure ONTAP 9.17.1 is all about helping our customers stay secure, resilient, and efficient without adding complexity. This release brings practical updates that make it easier to protect data, maintain uptime, and optimize performance across environments. Whether you're pushing the limits of AI or keeping mission-critical operations humming, ONTAP continues to deliver better performance, protection, and simplicity at scale. Smarter security, built for real-world threats Autonomous Ransomware Protection (ARP) now extends to SAN workloads, using entropy-based real-time detection and smarter snapshot retention. It’s proactive, adaptive, and unified across NAS and SAN, giving customers peace of mind without added complexity. Just-in-Time (JIT) privilege elevation introduces temporary admin access with full auditability, a win for security-conscious teams balancing control and agility. IPsec enhancements and HSTS support strengthen encrypted communications. Disaster Recovery without the complexity SnapMirror Active Sync now supports NVMe/TCP and NVMe/FC, enabling synchronous replication and transparent failover for VMware workloads. It’s high-performance DR, simplified, with ultra-low latency for mission-critical apps while helping businesses meet stringent RTO/RPO requirements. The new ONTAP Cloud Mediator acts as a quorum witness, eliminating the need for a third physical site in failover scenarios, reducing cost and complexity. This streamlined architecture not only lowers infrastructure costs but also accelerates deployment and enhances high availability, ensuring critical workloads remain protected without added operational overhead Efficiency and insight, out of the box File System Analytics is now enabled by default for new NAS volumes, giving customers instant visibility into file behavior without manual setup. Enhanced FlexGroup delete tracking improves transparency for async operations. It’s a small but meaningful boost for operational teams. Automation that works for you ONTAP 9.17.1 adds 20 new REST APIs, covering everything from NVMe subsystem management to ARP entropy stats and SAML metadata. It’s a big step forward for teams automating security and storage operations. Smarter object storage for hybrid workflows Support for CopyObject actions and multiprotocol tagging/metadata in ONTAP S3 buckets makes it easier to manage hybrid workflows and metadata-driven automation. Simplifying failover with ONTAP Cloud Mediator Business continuity is critical, but traditional failover architectures often come with added cost and complexity, especially when a third physical site is required to act as a quorum witness. That’s where the ONTAP Cloud Mediator comes in. With ONTAP 9.17.1, NetApp introduced the Cloud Mediator as a lightweight, cloud-based quorum witness that simplifies high availability for MetroCluster IP configurations. It eliminates the need for a third physical site, reducing infrastructure overhead while maintaining robust failover capabilities. For customers, this means easier deployment, lower costs, and faster recovery, all without compromising reliability. On-prem or in hybrid environments, the Cloud Mediator helps ensure your data stays available, always. Migrating made easier: Foreign LUN Import For customers looking to simplify migration from legacy storage systems, ONTAP continues to make it easier. Foreign LUN Import (FLI) enhancements in ONTAP streamline the process of bringing external LUNs into ONTAP environments with minimal disruption. Whether you're consolidating infrastructure or transitioning to NetApp ASA, FLI helps reduce complexity and downtime during migration, giving teams more control and confidence as they modernize.   NTAP 9.18.1: scaling smarter, operating safer ONTAP 9.18.1 builds on the foundation of secure, resilient infrastructure with updates that help customers scale efficiently and operate with confidence. Here are the highlights: Smarter scalability for block storage Support for up to 256 SVMs per cluster on NetApp ASA systems (up from 32), giving organizations the flexibility to grow without added complexity. Customers running multi-tenant workloads can now consolidate more customer environments into fewer clusters. Instead of deploying multiple clusters to stay within the 32-SVM limit, they can now support up to 256 isolated environments per cluster, reducing hardware footprint, simplifying management, and lowering operational costs. Better insights and faster recovery for object storage Cluster-wide S3 performance metrics provide deeper visibility for planning and optimization. Now, customers managing large-scale datasets across hybrid environments can now monitor S3 throughput and latency directly from ONTAP. This helps them identify performance bottlenecks, optimize tiering strategies, and ensure smooth delivery of content to downstream applications, all without relying on external monitoring tools Faster, storage-based snapshot restores reduce downtime and simplify recovery workflows. For instance, a customer running critical databases on ONTAP can now restore large volumes from snapshots directly on the storage layer, without needing to involve host-side tools or lengthy data movement. This allows them to recover from accidental deletions or corruption in minutes instead of hours, keeping SLAs intact and minimizing business disruption Security that protects without compromise Cluster network and HA encryption ensure all internal traffic is protected, maintaining high availability and data integrity. Customers running sensitive workloads across multiple data centers can now encrypt all internal cluster communications, including HA heartbeat traffic, without impacting performance. This helps meet strict compliance requirements like FIPS and NIST, while ensuring that critical services remain highly available and secure from internal threats or misconfigurations.   Two releases, one vision: a smarter, safer future for data ONTAP 9.17.1 and 9.18.1 are not just sequential updates. They are complementary steps in a broader strategy to help customers modernize with confidence. Together, they reflect NetApp’s commitment to delivering intelligent data infrastructure that is secure, scalable, and built for real-world complexity. ONTAP 9.17.1 laid the foundation for stronger cyber resilience and operational simplicity, introducing smarter security features like autonomous ransomware protection for SAN and just-in-time privilege elevation. ONTAP 9.18.1 builds on that foundation by expanding scalability and internal encryption to support growth without compromise. From proactive threat detection to seamless failover, from RESTful automation to cluster-wide insights, these releases work together to help organizations protect, manage, and scale data across hybrid and multicloud environments. They reduce complexity and unlock new efficiencies, helping customers move forward with confidence. Join the conversation. Have questions about ONTAP 9.17.1 or 9.18.1? Share your thoughts, experiences, or feedback with the NetApp Community. We’re here to learn and grow together. ... View more

Is there a way to setup notifications so it continually alerts on monitor.volume.full.   According to support in only sends out one email at 95% and that is it. ... View more

Hi, I'm trying to configure Advanced Drive Partitioning (ADP) on my NetApp storage nodes running ONTAP 9.15.1P15. I followed the boot menu steps as per the documentation: (9a) Destroy aggregates, unpartition all disks and remove their ownership information. (9b) Clean configuration and initialize node with partitioned disks. (9c) Clean configuration and initialize node with whole disks. (9d) Reboot the node. (9e) Return to main boot menu. (9f) Remove disk ownership. I executed option 9a on both nodes successfully, but when I proceed with option 9b, it fails with the following message: Option (9a) MUST BE COMPLETED on BOTH nodes in an HA pair (and DR/DR-AUX partner nodes if applicable) prior to starting option (9b). Has option (9a) been completed on all the nodes (yes/no)? yes It is mandatory to perform 9a before choosing 9b or 9c, please return back to the menu and perform 9a. Rebooting to clear all env variables due to a 9b failure..Terminated I have repeated the process multiple times, confirming that option 9a was completed on both nodes, but the same issue persists. Can anyone please assist or advise what could be causing this failure?   ... View more