Cloud storage management can be complex, especially when you’re trying to meet the dynamic needs of your workloads and optimize your cloud spend at the same time. This situation becomes more challenging when many of the cloud storage offerings require you to provision capacity and performance together, leading to overprovisioning and cloud waste.
With Google Cloud NetApp Volumes Flex service and custom performance you can now overcome these challenges. Custom performance allows you to provision capacity, throughput, and IOPS individually and meet your applications’ performance requirements in a region of your choice.
The Flex service level of NetApp Volumes
NetApp Volumes is a fully managed file storage service that offers enterprise data management and protection with best-in-class efficiency and performance. The Flex service level combines decades of innovation from NetApp® with the innovations in Google’s latest hardware to offer a service that scales to meet your changing needs. It allows you to start as small as 1GiB volumes and 1TiB pools and expand up to 100TiB and 200TiB, respectively, while offering industry-leading data management and protection with clones, backups, and volume replication.
Independent scaling of capacity and performance
With General availability of custom performance in 17 Google cloud regions, you can pick capacity, throughput, and IOPS for your storage pool and scale them independently as your applications’ requirements change. The throughput and IOPS can dynamically scale completely independent of the capacity selected for the storage pool. Each pool gets an included 64 MiB/s of throughput and 1024 IOPS for for free. Additional throughput can be provisioned up to 5 GiB/s, with each MiB/s of throughput offering included 16 IOPS. Additional IOPS can be provisioned up to a total of 160,000 per storage pool. Throughput and IOPS can be increased or decreased according to your applications’ demands, irrespective of the capacity provisioned. All the volumes in the storage pool share the throughput and IOPS irrespective of their individual size.
Increased performance
In addition to the flexibility of independent scaling, the Flex service level has increased the per-storage-pool performance limit to 5GiB/s and IOPS to 160,000. This increase means you can deploy performance-intensive workloads like databases, high-performance computing (HPC), and high-performance file and user shares in a Google Cloud region of your choice while optimizing your cloud cost.
How do I access custom performance?
Custom performance is generally available with the Flex service level in 17 Google cloud regions. New regions will be added to expand the availability of custom performance across all Google Cloud regions. This feature is currently available with the Flex zonal availability only.
In regions with custom performance, you will be able to specify the throughout and IOPS in addition to capacity. In the following example, a 5TiB pool is provisioned with 2GiB/s of throughput with the included 32K IOPS.
After the pool is created, you can edit the pool to change all three dimensions as required. You can make these changes once every 4 hours.
Volumes created in the pool will share the total throughput and IOPS available, and you can use cloud monitoring can track the performance at an individual volume level.
Conclusion
Independent scaling of capacity and throughput with Google cloud NetApp Volumes Flex service level and custom performance is a powerful new feature that offers enhanced flexibility and control over cloud storage resources. By allowing you to scale capacity, throughput, and IOPS independently, this feature helps eliminate storage overprovisioning and optimize cloud spend. As a result, organizations can now align their cloud storage resources more closely with their workload demands, improving performance while minimizing waste.
Try out custom performance with the Flex service level of NetApp Volumes today. To learn more about the feature, visit our documentation page.
