NetApp makes big hybrid-cloud push

NetApp is making a major effort to support hybrid cloud with a batch of software announcements around storage products, converged infrastructure, and cloud-management services. The main news was the release of the latest version of its flagship ONTAP software, as well as updates to other products designed to help organizations build a better hybrid-cloud strategies. ONTAP is the operating system for NetApp’s FAS (hybrid flash-disk) and AFF (all-flash) storage arrays. The latest version, 9.9, adds automatic backup and tiering of on-premises data to NetApp’s StorageGRID object storage as well as to public clouds. It enhances multilevel file security and remote access management, supports continuous data availability for two-times larger MetroCluster configurations, and more replication options for backup and disaster recovery for large data containers for NAS workloads. It can attain up to four times the performance for single LUN applications such as VMware datastores.