New ONTAP May 2023 release: Innovating in security and simplicity

Customers consistently tell us that two of their biggest challenges are stopping ransomware attacks and simplifying operations to save time for their IT staff. NetApp has continued to deliver industry-leading storage solutions to help on both those fronts. Our newest release of NetApp^® ONTAP^® data management software, introduced earlier this month, makes autonomous ransomware protection even easier and stronger. And we’ve further simplified the management of consolidated workloads, so your applications get the resources they require to support your business.

Every year we release new versions of ONTAP, which provide our customers with our latest innovations and enhancements. We focus on helping them increase the security, flexibility, simplicity, performance, and efficiency of their storage environment, across on-premises and public cloud resources, while also reducing TCO.

Let’s jump into the highlights of how our recent enhancements can help solve your IT challenges.

Two years ago, NetApp introduced autonomous ransomware protection. It’s an industry-leading capability, based on machine learning, that can detect unexpected, out-of-bounds activity on file shares. If ONTAP identifies the start of a potential ransomware attack, it automatically alerts an administrator and creates a NetApp Snapshot™ copy of the data that’s beginning to be affected.

Three new enhancements for autonomous ransomware protection make protecting your data even easier and stronger:

• Simplify deployment with automatic learning and activation. Autonomous ransomware protection needs a learning period—typically between 7 and 30 days—to be trained to identify activities that might signify the start of a ransomware attack. Instead of an administrator choosing the length of a learning period and then having to remember to activate the feature, autonomous ransomware protection can now take on that responsibility. Built-in algorithms determine the optimal length of the learning period. And when that period is completed, the software automatically switches to active mode to begin protecting your data. This takes one more item off your IT team’s “to do” list.
• Require multiple administrators to turn off protection. You might be worried about the damage that can be done by a cybercriminal with a compromised admin account or by an administrator who accidentally enters a wrong command. If you’re already using ONTAP, have you protected your data from these types of issues by deploying multi-admin verification? It enables you to require approvals from multiple administrators before activating critical admin tasks such as volume and Snapshot deletion. In this latest ONTAP release, you can now require the approval of multiple administrators before autonomous ransomware protection can be turned off.
• Expand protection to large NAS datasets. Now you can expand the coverage of autonomous ransomware protection to your data in ONTAP FlexGroup volumes. These very large containers can extend up to 20PB and 400 billion files while also providing high performance and low latency.

Storage environments based on ONTAP have leading, built-in capabilities that are valuable for consolidating multiple workloads and managing private clouds. For example, they deliver high performance, scalability, reliability, and data protection, as well as a unified environment for block, file, and object.

With this latest ONTAP release, we’ve made it even easier to manage your on-premises consolidated workloads:

• Enhance the performance monitoring and capacity management of your applications. Now you can monitor performance and manage capacity by consistency groups, so that each application in a consistency group gets the horsepower and disk space that it needs.
• Keep each tenant within storage capacity boundaries during self-provisioning. New, simple consumption policies are now included in ONTAP. These policies enable cluster administrators to easily assign capacity limits for individual tenants, so they stay within a defined capacity boundary when doing self-provisioning.
• Deliver balanced performance levels for multiple applications. Adaptive quality of service (QoS) can now share QoS floors and ceilings across multiple storage objects. This advanced feature helps balance the demands on storage resources by enabling more workloads to be linked together to receive equal performance that's based on capacity.

This latest ONTAP release includes many other enhancements that further increase your data availability, storage efficiency, infrastructure scalability, and object data management. ONTAP is the most unified storage environment in the industry, with proven experience in supporting block, file, and object.

This latest release, ONTAP 9.13.1, became publicly available on May 4. It’s ready to be deployed today in your data center through ONTAP One, the industry’s most comprehensive data management suite. ONTAP One simplifies your on-premises environment by including all available NetApp ONTAP software for AFF, ASA, and FAS systems. And with NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP, it’s easy to also deploy ONTAP in public clouds. Plus, with the new, unified NetApp BlueXP^™ control plane, you can enable, manage, and optimize the ONTAP capabilities across your storage environment.

NetApp is ready to help you solve your IT challenges. For more information, visit the NetApp ONTAP webpage.