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In this episode, we talk with Eiki Hraffnsson (@Eirikurh), Technical Director, NetApp Cloud Data Services. Eiki gave a great talk at Cloud Field Day 3 (CFD3), although neither Howard nor I were in attendance. I just met Eiki at a NetApp Spring Analyst event earlier this month and after that Howard and I had a chance to talk with him about what’s new in NetApp Cloud Data Services
This is the fourth time NetApp has been on our show (see our podcast with Lee Caswell and Dave Wright, podcast with Andy Banta, & last month’s sponsored podcast with Adam Carter) and this is their second sponsored podcast.
Eiki came from a company NetApp acquired last year called GreenQloud whose product was QStack. Since then, QStack has become an integral part of their Cloud Data Services.
NetApp has a number of solutions under their Cloud Data Services umbrella and his area of specialty is NetApp Cloud Data Volumes, soon to be available in the MarketPlace on AWS, already in public preview an Microsoft Azure Enterprise NFS and as of 7 May 2018, in private preview as NetApp Cloud Volumes for Google Cloud Platform.
NetApp Cloud Data Volumes
NetApp’s Cloud Data Volume is a public cloud based, storage-as-a-service that supplies enterprise class NFS and SMB (CIFS) storage on a pay as you go model for major public cloud providers. That way your compute instances can have access to predictable performance, highly available file storage in the cloud.
One advantage that Cloud Data Volumes adds to the public cloud is performance SLAs. That is customers can purchase Low, Medium and High performance file storage. Eiki said they measured Cloud Data Volume IO performance and it achieved almost 10X the public cloud normal (file) storage performance. I assume this was HIGH performing Cloud Data Volume storage, and no information on which storage type was used as the cloud alternative.
Cloud Data Volume customers also get access to NetApp Snapshot services which can create, space efficient, quick read-only copies of their cloud file storage. Cloud Data Volume storage can be purchased on a $/GB/month basis. Other purchase options are also available for customers who prefer a pre billed amount rather than a consumptive model.
Behind the scenes, Cloud Data Volumes is actually NetApp ONTAP storage. They won’t say what kind or how much, but they do say that NetApp storage is located in public cloud data centers and is fully managed by NetApp.
Customers can use the public cloud native services portal to purchase Cloud Data Volume storage (for Microsoft Azure and GCP) or the NetApp Cloud web portal (for AWS). Once purchased, customers can use an extensive set of native cloud APIs to provision, access and tear-down Cloud Volume storage.
Other NetApp Cloud Data Services
Eiki mentioned that Cloud Data Volumes is just one of many offerings from NetApp’s Cloud Data Services business unit, including:
- NetApp Private Storage– colocated NetApp storage owned by customers that is adjacent to public clouds.
- ONTAP Cloud – software defined ONTAP storage system that run in the cloud on compute services using cloud storage to provide block storage.
- Cloud Sync – data synchronization as a service offering used to replicate data from onprem NAS and object storage to the public cloud.
Probably a few others I am missing here and my bet is more offerings are on the way.
Another item Eiki mentioned with the open source, NetApp Trident Plugin (GitHub repo). Containers are starting to need persistent state information and this means they need access to storage.
Trident provides dynamic, API driven provisioning of storage volumes for containers under Kubernetes. Container developers define environmental characteristics which dictate operational environment and now with Trident, can also specify needed storage volumes. That way, when Kubernetes fires up a container for execution, NetApp storage is provisioned just-in-time to support container stateful execution.
The podcast runs ~25 minutes. Eiki was very knowledgeable and was easy to talk with especially on cloud technologies and how NetApp fits in. Listen to the podcast to learn more.
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Erikur (Eiki) Hrafnsson, Technical Director, NetApp Cloud Data Services
Erikur (Eiki) Hrafnsson is an entrepreneur, dad, singer. founder of GreenQloud and maker of QStack, the hybrid cloud platform, now part of NetApp Cloud Data Services. Eiki brings deep public cloud integration knowledge and broad experience in cloud automation and APIs.