I’m excited to announce that NetApp® StorageGRID® 11.6 is releasing this March 3rd!
This new release introduces integration with Google Cloud, which extends our industry-leading hybrid cloud integration with the largest hyperscalers: Azure, AWS, and now Google Cloud. With the new features, our customers also benefit from new security enhancements, enhance compliance with advanced data retention functionality, and accelerate performance for their analytical workloads.
The key features of the release are organized into five areas that IT organizations and system administrators care most about.
Hybrid cloud
Many enterprises are already customers of the cloud hyperscalers. With this release of StorageGRID, they no longer need to choose.
- Support for Google Cloud
- Support your hybrid cloud strategy by tiering or replicating data to Google Cloud.
- Make the most of your storage investment. Take advantage of Google Cloud’s low-cost storage tiers and automatically tier your cold StorageGRID data. Or replicate a subset of your hot data to Google Cloud and use their compute services to perform analytics.
Performance and scale
Deploying object storage is becoming popular with enterprise analytics, which means that applications need faster performance. StorageGRID 11.6 adds these new capabilities.
- Support for AWS S3 Select
- Perform simple SQL operations against your raw data stored in StorageGRID.
- Optimize data retrieval by querying for only the data your application requires.
- Scale and performance improvements
- Object storage use cases have evolved, resulting in an increase in small file workloads (artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, databases, IoT). At the scale of petabytes, this leads to billions of objects and constant read, write, and delete workloads.
- StorageGRID SG60XX nodes now support up to 1.5 billion objects and have improved delete performance.
Compliance
Storage compliance with all the government regulations can be a challenge. Two new improvements were added to StorageGRID 11.6.
- Enhancements to Amazon S3 Object Lock
- Improved Amazon S3 Object Lock support with bucket default retention. All newly ingested objects in that bucket have Object Lock retention applied to them.
- Specifying a default retention period for the bucket makes it easier for applications to configure and use S3 Object Lock.
- Support for AWS C2S
- StorageGRID CloudMirror now supports replication to S3 in AWS Commercial Cloud Services (C2S). AWS C2S supplies AWS services to serve and support the U.S. intelligence community
- Modernizes StorageGRID support for the U.S. public sector. By replicating data to AWS C2S, the U.S. public sector can use AWS compute while staying compliant.
Security
Ransomware, hackers, and data breachers beware. This release continues to add to the NetApp portfolio of security capabilities.
- Multi VLAN support on client and grid networks
- Added support to configure virtual LAN (VLAN) interfaces on your StorageGRID network.
- Enables you to isolate and partition application traffic for security, flexibility, and performance.
- Support for Azure AD and PingFederate
- Added support for Azure AD for identity federation. Also supports Azure AD and PingFederate for single sign-on authentication.
- Improves StorageGRID compatibility with identity federation and single sign-on services, both of which strengthen the security of your organization.
Simplicity
IT environments are constantly striving to improve their efficiency. StorageGRID 11.6 comes with several features to reduce the time spent on routine activities.
- Usability enhancements to the Grid Manager
- The user interface has been substantially redesigned, with new navigation, search bar, summary pages, and wizards.
- The redesign improves the experience of both the grid admin and the tenant user in monitoring, configuring, and navigating StorageGRID.
- Support for external syslog server
- Connect StorageGRID to an external syslog server to save and manage StorageGRID logs.
- Monitor and manage StorageGRID logs more efficiently with the rest of your infrastructure.
- Streamlined upgrade and hotfix process
- With StorageGRID 11.6, the next major upgrades and hotfixes can be applied at the same time. The UI now shows the recommended upgrade path, for hassle-free upgrades.
Want to learn more about StorageGRID? Visit the NetApp StorageGRID website.
