Introduction
If you’re in the market for the best storage and data management system but are struggling to get beyond vendor claims, you’re not alone. Analysts like GigaOm have recognized your pain and seek to alleviate it with their annual report on scale-out storage. In the latest report, GigaOm evaluates some of the major vendors in scale-out storage and named NetApp a Leader. Let’s dive in and see why so many customers turn to NetApp to solve their most difficult data management challenges.
What is scale-out storage?
The GigaOm Radar for Scale-Out Storage provides a detailed analysis of the scale-out storage market, evaluating vendors based on innovation, performance, and market impact. Scale-out storage systems are designed to handle large volumes of data by adding more nodes to the system, offering scalability, flexibility, resilience, and high performance. This architecture is ideal for organizations needing to expand their storage capacity seamlessly.
The report categorizes vendors into different hemispheres based on their maturity and innovation, assessing them on key features, emerging criteria, and business criteria such as performance, scalability, manageability, and cost efficiency. Leaders in the market are recognized for their strong presence and innovative solutions.
GigaOm on NetApp ONTAP
The GigaOm report positions NetApp ONTAP as a Leader and Fast Mover, with exceptional scores on severaldecision criteria. NetApp offers:
- Unified Storage Solution: Flexibility and Versatility: NetApp ONTAP supports block, file, and object storage, providing a unified platform that simplifies data management. This versatility allows you to manage diverse workloads within a single system, reducing complexity and operational overhead.
- Scalability: ONTAP's architecture is designed for scalability, enabling you to grow your storage infrastructure seamlessly as your data needs expand.
- Data Security: ONTAP's comprehensive security features, including encryption and compliance tools, help protect sensitive information and meet regulatory requirements.
- Capacity Optimization: The AFF C Series, powered by ONTAP, offers high-density flash storage that maximizes space efficiency. This results in significant savings on power, cooling, and physical space, making it a cost-effective solution for modern data centers.
- Operational Efficiency: ONTAP's intuitive management tools and automation capabilities streamline administrative tasks, freeing up your time to focus on strategic initiatives.
- Seamless Connectivity: NetApp ONTAP facilitates easy data movement between on-premises and cloud environments, supporting hybrid cloud strategies. This flexibility allows you to leverage the benefits of both worlds, optimizing performance and cost.
- Unified Management: A single storage OS environment simplifies management across different infrastructures, reducing the learning curve and operational complexity.
Key Strengths
The GigaOm report highlights three key areas where NetApp ONTAP received the highest possible scores. We are most pleased by these recognized areas of strength because each of them represents areas where our customers tell us they are struggling most with competitor systems. That the GigaOm report recognizes our leadership in these areas is a testament to our focus on customer needs now and into the future.
Public cloud integration
NetApp is the leader in unified on-prem and cloud storage. No other storage solution gives you a single unified experience across the major cloud environments and your on-prem storage systems. We do this by leveraging the same storage operating system, ONTAP across our on-prem systems and the public cloud environments. On the cloud, we offer both a first party experience with AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. For greater control and customization, we offer Cloud Volumes ONTAP for customers that want to manage the deployment on the public or private cloud of their choice. Because its ONTAP, customers can expect the same management experience, capabilities and data mobility wherever their workloads live.
GigaOm gave our public cloud integration a top score of 5/5 citing our extensive cloud integration capabilities as mentioned above.
Ransomware protection
ONTAP offers several ransomware detection, protection, and recovery capabilities. One of the most powerful and unique in the industry is The Autonomous Ransomware Protection (ARP) feature which uses workload analysis in NAS (NFS and SMB) environments to proactively detect and warn about abnormal activity that might indicate a ransomware attack. When an attack is suspected, ARP also creates new snapshots in addition to the existing protection provided by scheduled snapshots.
Beginning with ONTAP 9.16.1, ARP improves cyber resiliency by adopting a machine-learning model for anti-ransomware analytics that detects constantly evolving forms of ransomware with 99% accuracy. ARP's machine-learning model is pre-trained on a large dataset of files both before and after a simulated ransomware attack. This resource-intensive training is done outside ONTAP, but the learning from this training is used for the model inside ONTAP. We are so confident in our ability to protect customers from threats that we offer an industry-leading ransomware recovery guarantee. Click here for details.
GigaOm recognized our leadership in ransomware protection by assessing us with a score of 5/5 in ransomware protection. The report specifically identified our ARP capabilities as a key factor in this assessment.
AI/ML-based analytics and management
ONTAP the critical part of our portfolio that makes our systems unified and enables scale-out architecture. And it works in conjunction with comprehensive management tools such as BlueXP to simplify management and operations across an organizations data estate through AI based automation of many common administrative tasks. GigOm recognized NetApp’s leadership in this space by giving us a 5/5 score for our comprehensive analytics and management tools, particularly BlueXP and Data Infrastructure Insights.
Conclusion
The GigaOm report demonstrates why NetApp ONTAP is a leading choice for storage administrators. Its unified storage capabilities, advanced data protection, cost efficiency, and hybrid cloud integration make it an ideal solution for modern data management needs. If you're considering expanding your storage infrastructure, NetApp ONTAP offers a robust and reliable platform to help you achieve your goals.
Want more? The GigaOm report provided free of charge here gives a comprehensive review of most of the vendors in this space. Read the full report to see how we compare them to other vendors and you’ll see why NetApp ONTAP is the leading solution to meet your scale-out storage and data management needs.
The items listed here are not items highlighted in the report. The three strengths highlighted in the report are public cloud integration, ransomware protection, and AI/ML-based analytics and management (under the “Strengths” section in the NetApp capsule).