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.
We’re excited to introduce independent scaling of capacity and throughput for Google Cloud NetApp Volumes through the Flex service level, which allows you to overcome these challenges. With the preview of this feature, you can 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 the preview of independent scaling, 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; throughput can start as low as 64MiB/s and scale up to 5GiB/s, with each MiB/s of throughput offering included 16 IOPS. You can increase throughput in increments of 1MiB/s. 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. 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 independent scaling?
Independent Scaling will be available in 13 Google Cloud regions during preview. The region coverage will be expanded leading up to the general availability release. This feature is offered with the Flex zonal availability during preview.
When you create a storage pool in the Google Cloud NetApp Volumes console, you can choose Custom Performance after selecting the Flex service level and the zonal availability in one of the regions where the preview is available.
In the following example, a small 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 for the Flex service level of Google Cloud NetApp Volumes 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 independent scaling with the Flex service level of NetApp Volumes today. To learn more about the feature, visit our documentation page.