All your datasets are welcome on Google Cloud NetApp Volumes

Today at Google Cloud Next 2024, we are happy to announce the upcoming preview of two innovative features: Large Volumes and Auto-tiering in Google Cloud NetApp Volumes, starting in Q2 2024. 

Since Google Cloud NetApp Volumes service was launched in August 2023, the service has gained traction among customers who are migrating enterprise file workloads to Google Cloud. Among several customer use cases that we’ve seen, two patterns stood out and called for special attention.

1. Customers are seeking large volumes for their data.

   In the world of unstructured data, customers create large repositories of data, and in some cases, they also create secondary copies of their data for disaster recovery and failover scenarios. Consolidating large amounts of data into fewer volumes simplifies their administrative and management operations.

   Google Cloud NetApp Volumes today supports volumes up to 100TiB, but some customers need even bigger volumes. At that scale, they also need to optimize for costs as allowed by application data access patterns.

2. Customers are seeking extreme performance access to their data.

   High-performance workloads such as AI training jobs, high-performance computing (HPC) simulations, and electronic design automation (EDA) jobs require customers to gain access to their data faster and to preserve this high performance as the datasets grow and the systems scale. The challenge for customers is to achieve performance gains without losing data management capabilities.

Google Cloud NetApp Volumes today delivers up to 4.5GiB/s throughput, but the AI training, HPC, and EDA use cases require higher throughput.

Building on the extensive list of NetApp® ONTAP® capabilities that address these challenges, NetApp collaborated with Google Cloud teams to deliver the following features on Google Cloud NetApp Volumes. These features provide faster access to large amounts of data, while continuing to offer rich data management capabilities and cost optimizations.

• Large Volumes: Petabyte-scale volumes on demand
  • 100TiB to 1PiB volumes in Premium and Extreme service level storage pools 
  • Up to 6GiB/s for Premium and 12GiB/s for Extreme volumes 
  • Preview available in Q2 2024 in 15 Google Cloud regions 
• Auto-tiering: Reduce your cloud costs for large datasets 
  • Lower-cost file storage solution by intelligent movement of infrequently accessed data to a lower-cost storage tier. 
  • No changes required to application for data access and seamless retrieval of data through file storage access mechanisms. 
  • Configurable, by policy, at the volume level for Premium and Extreme service levels.
  • Coexists with other critical data management features like volume replication, backups, snapshots, and large volumes. 
  • Preview available in Q2 2024 in 15 Google Cloud regions. 

These two new features add to the rich portfolio of enterprise data management capabilities in Google Cloud NetApp Volumes. Those capabilities include:

• A fully Google Cloud managed cloud storage service. A file storage service with no infrastructure to configure. 
• Multiprotocol file system support. Concurrent file access across Windows and Linux file systems. 
• Scalability. Dynamic scaling to hundreds of volumes and the ability to dynamically resize volumes up and down. 
• Google Cloud user experience. Secure integration with Google Identity and Access Management (IAM), Google Cloud APIs, the gcloud CLI, and the Google Cloud console includes extended integration with the Google Cloud portfolio of services. 
• Secure by design. Network security, access control, and data encryption, at rest and in motion, with support for customer-managed encryption keys. 

Other new features added to Google Cloud NetApp Volumes since its introduction include: 

• Flex service level. Highly available storage volumes with scalability from one GiB to 100TiB and up to one GiB/s of performance, depending on the size of the underlying storage pool. This adaptable service level can support a wide variety of use cases, including AI.
• Google Cloud Vertex AI platform integration. Enables organizations to leverage retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and tap into previously inaccessible corporate data, including images, videos, audio, and text, offering new possibilities for creative endeavors, scientific research, and business problem solving. 
• VMware datastore certification. Extend your existing investments in VMware, using the same tools and processes that you already use, while benefiting from Google Cloud’s planet scale. 
• Terraform integration. Automate provisioning and management of Google Cloud NetApp Volumes resources using the powerful and widely used Terraform ecosystem. 
• Integrated backup. Now generally available, this fully managed backup solution enables easy full-volume backups for long-term recovery, archiving, and compliance.

Google Cloud NetApp Volumes will serve your use cases as you expand your cloud usage for additional workloads or start your cloud journey by standardizing to a storage platform for your diverse workloads. It gives you a platform to seamlessly migrate all your enterprise workloads, regardless of their capacity or performance needs—all without refactoring. 

Join us at Google Cloud Next 2024 in booth #1231 to learn more and register your interest by joining the preview customer list. 

This blog is co-authored with Rukmani Gopalan, Group Product Manager, Google Cloud NetApp Volumes, Google.