Enterprise IT is rapidly evolving. NetApp customers are increasingly incorporating on-premises and off-premises clouds and third-party service providers into their data storage workflows. In this environment, Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) addressable storage is pivotal to giving applications simple and flexible access to data regardless of storage platform. NetApp® StorageGRID® object-based storage solutions address the unique needs of service providers and large enterprises, providing S3 addressable object storage without compromising enterprise reliability or requiring a team of skilled engineers to configure and maintain.
This blog post covers some of the StorageGRID service-provider-focused features.
S3 APIs
With customer data and applications leveraging cloud and on-premises resources, support for S3 APIs like Object Lock, S3 Select, and so on ensures that cloud-native applications can be deployed on premises as well. You can deploy SaaS on StorageGRID without worrying about gaps in API support.
Secure multitenancy
With secure multitenancy, different groups or customers can access their data, and only their data. Independent Active Directory or LDAP authentication, including SSO, is supported. Each tenant has a unique self-sign-in portal to manage access and monitor usage. For an in-depth look, check out our previous blog post dedicated to this feature.
Quality-of-service controls
Prevent noisy neighbors with load balancing and workload monitoring, storage quotas, and network traffic classifiers to implement per-tenant bandwidth and rate-limiting controls. These features are essential when handling millions of users in a SaaS environment.
Information lifecycle management (ILM)
ILM rules determine how data is protected, the region where the data is located, or what tier of storage (flash, hybrid, HDD) data lives in. They enable service providers to provide and enforce different performance options and to keep data close to the clients for faster access.
ILM rules can be set for tenants, buckets, and object keys, providing a clear picture of how your data is stored.
Integrated monitoring
StorageGRID offers extensive Grafana dashboards, allowing near-real-time system monitoring for operations personnel.
Modular scalability
Grow your cluster capacity, performance, and geographic diversity simply by adding nodes. As the number of tenants grows, nondisruptively add storage nodes to increase capacity and improve performance. Add new sites to distribute the data for redundancy or to be closer to data consumers. All under a single namespace!
StorageGRID solutions are designed to last. Modular scalability prevents the need for forklift upgrades and enables nondisruptive expansion whenever your business requires it. Node cloning makes it easy to replace appliances that are nearing end of life, or to upgrade to larger appliances.
Multiple VLAN support
Client networks can be isolated for increased security, which is important for SaaS environments because it enables a storage endpoint to share a VLAN with an application, reducing network overhead. In the case of service providers, who may have dozens or hundreds of clients on their grid, this ability can significantly reduce network overhead and application latency.
Automation
Automation is key to minimizing the people hours required to manage infrastructure at scale. NetApp provides Ansible playbooks to automate tenant configuration. StorageGRID is API first – everything that can be done via the Grid Manager UI can be done via the API, giving developers the flexibility to automate the management of their grid. To learn more, read Automating StorageGRID Operations with Ansible.
Conclusion
Combined with decades of proven enterprise support from NetApp, StorageGRID enables the scale, performance, and features that service providers require to grow their business and extend value to their customers. NetApp’s ongoing commitment to object storage helps StorageGRID meet not just today’s requirements, but the future’s as well. To learn more, contact your NetApp partner or sales team today.
For more information, see S3 as an Opportunity for Service Providers on NetApp TV.
