We are thrilled to announce a significant enhancement to Google Cloud NetApp Volumes with the integration of Assured Workloads. This powerful combination empowers organizations to deploy NetApp Volumes in a rigorously secure and controlled environment, specifically designed to meet the stringent compliance demands of highly regulated sectors such as government, healthcare, and financial services.   Google Cloud NetApp Volumes offers organizations Assured Workloads Regions and Support for Regional Controls in Australia, Canada, Europe, Singapore, and US regions.    Reduced Risk With Assured Workloads support, Google Cloud NetApp Volumes opens the path to running more secure and compliant storage workloads on Google Cloud. Enterprises can now significantly reduce their risk and liability by enabling adherence to relevant standards and regulations and mitigate risks of noncompliance that can result in reputational damage, legal challenges, and severe penalties.   Future-proof security Regulatory standards are constantly evolving to address emerging technologies and threats. Google Cloud NetApp Volumes with Assured Workloads support helps enterprises stay ahead of these changes and enables their compliance measures to remain effective and up to date, future-proofing their security and compliance.   Uncompromised compliance Navigating the complex landscape of industry regulations and standards like ISO, SOC, HIPAA, and GDPR is simplified with Assured Workloads. Assured Workloads offers a preconfigured environment meticulously designed to align with these requirements, easing the burden of compliance and audit preparation. Assured Workloads establishes a fortified environment for NetApp Volumes, incorporating robust isolation controls and encryption mechanisms to safeguard sensitive data from unauthorized access and potential breaches.   Comprehensive security and performance NetApp Volumes delivers exceptional performance and scalability to support demanding workloads. Integration with Assured Workloads lets the high-performance capability remain uncompromised, even within the most security-conscious environments. By providing a comprehensive security framework, Assured Workloads can potentially reduce the need for supplementary security measures, leading to cost savings and operational efficiencies.   Enhanced controls and visibility   Assured Workloads offers enterprises stringent controls and enhanced visibility into data locality, personnel access, and auditing of their data stored in NetApp Volumes.   Data locality - Assured Workloads provides granular control over data location, allowing you to specify where NetApp Volumes data is stored and processed, maintaining  compliance with data sovereignty and residency requirements. Personnel access - Stringent controls are implemented to govern access to NetApp Volumes environments within Assured Workloads. Enterprises have the authority to define which Google Cloud personnel can access your data and under what circumstances, providing an additional layer of security and oversight. Audit logging - Comprehensive audit logging capabilities in Assured Workloads offer detailed visibility into activities and events in your NetApp Volumes environment. This transparency aids in monitoring, troubleshooting, and maintaining compliance. Cryptographic control over data access - All data stored in NetApp Volumes is encrypted by default. For more control on data encryption, you can use Cloud Key Management Service (Cloud KMS) to manage your own encryption keys. Assured Workloads supports appropriate encryption based on compliance needs. Google Cloud's multilayered approach maintains data confidentiality, security, and compliance. Use cases   The synergy between NetApp Volumes and Assured Workloads unlocks a wide array of use cases.   Highly regulated industries - Organizations operating in sectors with stringent regulatory requirements, such as healthcare, financial services, and government, can leverage NetApp Volumes with Assured Workloads to confidently deploy workloads in a secure and compliant manner. Sensitive data - For organizations entrusted with safeguarding sensitive data, including personally identifiable information (PII), protected health information (PHI), and financial data, NetApp Volumes with Assured Workloads offers robust protection against unauthorized access and data leakage. Mission-critical applications - Assured Workloads provides a dependable foundation for mission-critical applications that rely on NetApp Volumes, so that these applications operate within a secure and highly available environment and minimize the risk of disruptions and downtime.   Get started The integration of Assured Workloads with NetApp Volumes enables seamless deployment and management. The intuitive interface and comprehensive documentation facilitate the configuration and deployment of volumes in the Assured Workloads environment.   To delve deeper into the capabilities and benefits highlighted in this blog post, explore our detailed documentation and resources for Assured Workloads and Google Cloud NetApp Volumes. Elevate your enterprise’s file storage and compliance capabilities with Google Cloud NetApp Volumes and Assured Workloads support. Embrace the future of secure, compliant, and efficient data management today.   ... View more

NetApp has been dedicated to automation with Ansible, and StorageGRID is a great example.  The great work that has been done for ONTAP is also being leveraged for my favorite object storage platform. That’s right, you can now authenticate within the module just like the ONTAP modules allow.  This allows for more concise playbooks, as well as an easier process for using the StorageGRID modules.  Usernames and Passwords can be kept in vaults and passed in via variables.  ... View more

"This article was orignally published on Apr 25, 2016"   Hi Folks, I’m excited to share with you the publishing of NetApp Technical Report (TR) 4506: Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8 on FlexPod! If you’d like to deploy the very latest version of Red Hat OpenStack Platform easily, and in an automated and highly available manner on FlexPod, this document is for you! Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8 on FlexPod We’re also proud to contribute customized Heat templates and shell scripting code upstream to Github to help you deploy this solution faster and with less problems! This is the very same templates we’ve used to deploy Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8 on FlexPod in our lab! All of the code is freely available here: TR-4506 GitHub Code About this document This document represents an enterprise-grade open hybrid cloud foundation that helps you to deploy OpenStack on an enterprise-class converged infrastructure (FlexPod) built with NetApp® FAS and E-Series storage, Cisco® UCS servers and Cisco Nexus switches, and Red Hat’s OpenStack Platform. You can find the following and more in the TR: Context and Technology Overview as to why FlexPod represents the best enterprise-class converged infrastructure platform for OpenStack deployments. Detailed implementation instructions on how to configure a fresh out-of-the-box FAS8040 two-node pair redundantly and prepare it for usage for: Cinder volumes and Glance images utilizing NetApp technology exposed to it through the NetApp unified Cinder driver and the NetApp Clustered Data ONTAP (cDOT) Operating System Manila shares through the NetApp unified Manila driver and NetApp cDOT Stateless computing via iSCSI boot LUNs to eventual Cisco UCS Service Profiles Detailed implementation instructions on how to bring up and configure an E5660 dual-controller storage system and prepare it as the backbone for a highly available and resilient OpenStack Object Storage deployment. Architectural diagrams and guidance on networking segmentation through 802.1Q VLANs to be utilized in the eventual OpenStack deployment Step-by-step instructions on deploying the Red Hat OpenStack Platform director, a lifecycle management and orchestration utility (based on the upstream TripleO project) used to: discover and introspect via the OpenStack Ironic project the physical server blades to be used for OpenStack provide an extensible framework based on Heat orchestration templates (written in Yaml) used to configure and launch an OpenStack deployment deploy Red Hat Enteprise Linux 7.2 on bare-metal UCS server blades via iSCSI boot from SAN — the entire root disk of all of the servers in this solution are stored on the NetApp FAS8040 to enable stateless computing, rather than using local disks in the servers themselves install and customize all the necessary OpenStack related packages via Puppet in an automated and highly available deployment backed by Pacemaker for service-level HA ensure that the newly created overcloud has Cinder volumes and Glance images backed by NFS on the NetApp FAS8040, Swift object and metadata information backed by the NetApp E5660, out of the box with no special user configuration or manual deployment required Post Deployment Instructions after the OpenStack deployment is finished: Deploy the OpenStack Manila (File-share-as-a-service) project in a highly available, automated fashion with the NetApp Manila driver in the resulting overcloud Add additional DM-multipath paths via iSCSI to the resulting overcloud deployment for additional high availability and redundancy Comprehensive post-deployment validation instructions are provided to show the reader common operations in the resulting overcloud to do the following, all through the Horizon dashboard: Create a tenant Upload operating system images to the Image service (Glance) Create flavors Create a project and a user Create a tenant network and router Set a gateway for the tenant router, and create a Floating IP network Create and boot a persistent instance (VMs) from volume Associate a floating IP address with this newly created instance Verfiy both inbound and outbound network connectivity to the instance Provision a file share via the File Share service (Manila) and have the instance mount and write to the share Upload objects and verify access to them via the Object Storage service (Swift) Finally, we also take advantage of the OpenStack Rally project (Benchmark-as-a-service) to demonstrate the advantages and value proposition of using NetApp storage and NetApp software (our Unified Cinder driver for OpenStack) together for a higher performant, space efficient storage foundation for your OpenStack cloud. Purpose built applicances for OpenStack like the FlexPod converged infrastructure platform contain best-of-breed physical infrastructure and software integrations in OpenStack that help you go further & faster to rolling out OpenStack for Production Deployments versus traditional, do-it-yourself deployments. For more info A four page Technology Overview on this solution can be browsed here: FlexPod for Enterprise-Grade Clouds More information about NetApp’s participation in the OpenStack community can be found at netapp.github.io Check out all things FlexPod on the web at www.flexpod.com Other FlexPod solution collateral RHEL-OSP6 FlexPod CVD: Design Guide — Design elements of deploying Red Hat OpenStack Platform 6 (based on OpenStack Juno) on FlexPod. This prevously released document includes integral design elements to the overall solution as well as why technology chosen in the architectural design represent the best choice for a deployment.   RHEL-OSP6 FlexPod CVD: Deployment Guide — is a step-by-step, detailed implementation guide giving full steps on implementing Red Hat OpenStack Platform 6 on FlexPod. Also included is a subset of the Design Guide in order to provide necessary context for the Deployment Guide. To learn more about building a business-critical cloud for your organization, contact your NetApp, Cisco, or Red Hat sales representative or visit the following links: www.netapp.com/us/solutions/flexpod www.cisco.com/go/flexpod www.redhat.com/openstack ... View more

"This article was orignally published on Apr 11, 2016"   Many organizations have a dedicated cloud or application development team that leverages OpenStack API for resource provisioning and management. Others have a dedicated storage team that rely on OpenStack for block, file, and object storage. Regardless of the type of organization you work in, taking backups of your tenants’ data can reduce data loss, and protect against data corruption.   With OpenStack rolling-out in high profile enterprises, data protection now becomes an important requirement throughout an application's lifecycle.   This session will cover a variety of backup and restore options available for your OpenStack block and file storage. We will consider the various technologies for backups within local storage, to on-premise Swift, and offsite to public clouds.   Come to learn about a comparison of the different options and to discuss the strategy, architecture, config.    Below is the Session run by Kapil Arora [Cloud Architect from NetApp, Germany] and Akshai Parthasarathy [Technical Marketing Engineer at NetApp] covering :  Backup solutions for Cinder and Manila Storage-based replication for Cinder and Glance Share replication for Manila Application design goals for backup and recovery Consistent VM backups with Nova and Cinder including tenant VMs/VDI Demo Enterprise application backup and deployment with Manila and SAP HANA Demo     NetApp is committed to fostering open source solutions. You can learn more about our contributions by joining our Discord channel.  ... View more

NetApp on Mirantis OpenStack 8.0 ... View more