ONTAP

ONTAP is NetApp's internal operating system, specially optimized for storage functions at both high and low levels.

The original version of ONTAP had a proprietary non-UNIX kernel and a TCP/IP stack, networking commands, and low-level startup code from BSD.

In February 2018[citation needed] NetApp claims AFF systems for its clients gain an average of 4.72:1 Storage Efficiency from deduplication, compression, compaction, and clones savings.

ONTAP is considered to be a unified storage system, meaning that it supports both block-level (FC, FCoE, NVMeoF and iSCSI) & file-level (NFS, pNFS, CIFS/SMB) protocols for its clients.

This allows the storage system to provide its clients with nearly-uninterruptible access to their data should a node either fail unexpectedly or need to be rebooted in an operation known as a "takeover."

In MC configurations NVLOG also replicated between storage systems between sites but uses dedicated ports for that purpose, in addition to HA interconnect.

On network layer Single Namespace provide a number of techniques for non-disruptive IP address migration, like CIFS Continuous Availability (Transparent Failover), NetApp's Network Failover for NFS and SAN ALUA and path election for online front-end traffic re-balancing with data protocols.

BGP LIFs provide smarter load balancing than it was realized with hash algorithms in Ethernet Port Channel & LACP with interface groups.

Usually, e0M and SP both lives on a single management (wrench) physical Ethernet port but each has its own dedicated MAC address.

However, vsadmin can manage logical objects inside an SVM like create, delete and configure LUNs, FlexVol volumes and network addresses, so two SVMs in a cluster can't interfere with each other.

It is possible to copy in both SAN and NAS environments files, directories, LUNs and entire FlexVol content with ONTAP command ndmpcopy which is free.

The FlexGroup feature in ONTAP 9 allows to massively scale in a single namespace to over 20PB with over 400 billion files, while evenly spreading the performance across the cluster.

ONTAP 9.5 also added support for SMB features for native file auditing, FPolicy, Storage Level Access Guard (SLA), copy offload (ODX) and inherited watches of changes notifications; Quotas and Qtree.

In the identity preserve mode, SVM-DR copying volumes and data in them and also information like SVM configuration, IP addresses, CIFS AD integration which requires less configuration on DR site in case of disaster event on primary site but in this mode, the primary system must be offline to ensure there will be no conflict.

Relaxed Synchronous mode allows an application to write to continue on primary site if the SnapMirror Sync fails and once the relationship resumed, automatic re-sync will occur.

Source and destination FlexVolumes can be in a FabricPool aggregate but must use backup policy, FlexGroup volumes and quotas are not currently supported with SM-S. SM-S is not free feature, the license is included in the premium bundle.

It provides high availability in environments with directly attached (non-shared) disks on top of commodity servers, or at FAS and AFF platforms in Local SyncMirror or MetroCluster configurations.

SnapLock implements Write Once Read Many (WORM) functionality on magnetic and SSD disks instead of to optical media so that data cannot be deleted until its retention period has been reached.

Compliance mode was designed to assist organizations in implementing a comprehensive archival solution that meets strict regulatory retention requirements, such as regulations dictated by the SEC 17a-4(f) rule, FINRA, HIPAA, CFTC Rule 1.31(b), DACH, Sarbanes-Oxley, GDPR, Check 21, EU Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC, NF Z 42-013/NF Z 42-020, Basel III, MiFID, Patriot Act, Graham-Leach-Bliley Act etc.

Records and files committed to WORM storage on a SnapLock Compliance volume cannot be altered or deleted before the expiration of their retention period.

SnapLock Enterprise is geared toward assisting organizations that are more self-regulated and want more flexibility in protecting digital assets with WORM-type data storage.

Fabric Pool is currently compatible with the NetApp StorageGRID, Amazon S3, Google Cloud, and Alibaba object storage services.

FabricPool is transparent to applications and allows enterprises to take advantage of cloud economics without sacrificing performance or having to re-architect solutions to leverage storage efficiency.

The information which been transferred from the ONTAP system is snapshot deltas, not the entire set of data, and already deduplicated & compressed (on volume level).

ONTAP supports RBAC: Role-based access control allows administrative accounts to be restricted and/or limited in what actions they can take on the system.

FPolicy file-access notification system monitor activity on NAS storage and prevent unwanted access or change to files based on policy settings.

In ONTAP 9.2: Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) for LDAP over TLS; iSCSI Endpoint Isolation to specify a range of IP addresses that can log in to the storage; limit the number of failed login attempts over SSH.

NetApp Services Level Manager or NSLM for short is software for provisioning ONTAP storage that delivers predictable performance, capacity and data protection for a workload which exposes RESTful APIs and has built-in Swagger documentation with the list of the available APIs, and also can be integrated with other NetApp storage products like ActiveIQ Unified Manager.

Software-defined versions of ONTAP have nearly all the functionality except for Hardware-centric features like ifgroups, service processor, physical disk drives with encryption, MetroCluster over FCP, Fiber Channel protocol.

ONTAP Select leveraged RAID data protection on SSD and HDD drive level with underlying DAS, SAN, or vSAN storage systems.