NetApp adds Google Cloud NAS and AFF A800 NVMe flash array

NetApp has announced a NAS file access service in the Google public cloud plus an NVMe flash and NVMe-over Fibre Channel storage array, the AFF A800.

NetApp Cloud Volumes for GCP (Google Cloud Platform) provides cloud-native NAS file access storage that makes use of NetApp’s Ontap operating system in the cloud.

The move follows hot on the heels of Dell EMC’s Isilon Cloud for GCP and the cloud NAS services recently announced by Elastifile.

The new cloud NAS offering will be managed by NetApp and will offer enterprises the ability to migrate on-premise workloads to NetApp storage in the cloud or to deploy hybrid or multi-cloud operations that require NAS storage.

The service will support advanced Ontap functionality, such as snapshots, replication and clones.

NetApp Cloud Volumes for GCP can be provisioned and managed via the Google Cloud Launcher interface or via APIs and will support NFS and CIFS/SMB protocol access.

For now the service is only available to selected beta customers but will be widely available later in the year.

Google was until recently the only major public cloud provider not to offer NAS file access. Amazon has had Elastic File System, while NetApp provides cloud NAS file services on AWS. And, Microsoft has Azure Enterprise NFS, co-developed with NetApp.

Interest in file storage in the cloud is increasing as organisations seek the ability to migrate key applications to the cloud.

While a large proportion of contemporary application data needs are met by block and object storage in public cloud, a significant number of on-premises applications require NAS storage.

To be able to migrate NAS data to the cloud requires that the big cloud players offer sophisticated NAS services, and that’s what’s driving the big players in the market to the current levels of activity around file storage in the cloud.

Meanwhile, NetApp has released its first NVMe flash array, the AFF A800, which can deliver 1.3 million IOPS at 200μs.

The A800 can hold from 48 up up to 240 NVMe drives per HA pair, with 12 pairs possible in a cluster.

This allows for maximum capacity of 6.6PB per pair, with up to 79PB for a fully-loaded cluster. You can multiply those figure by about 4x to get effective capacity after data reduction technologies are applied.