What’s New in SnapMirror Synchronous for ONTAP 9.6
Cheryl George
Large enterprises like banks and healthcare, retail, and manufacturing organizations need “always-on” application availability because any downtime to mission-critical data can have serious repercussions for the organization’s financial performance.
NetApp® SnapMirror® Synchronous (SM-S), introduced in NetApp ONTAP® 9.5, provides volume granular and storage-efficient synchronous data replication that enterprises depend on for backup, disaster recovery, and data mobility. SM-S replicates data on NetApp FlexVol® volumes between fully redundant ONTAP storage systems located across data centers or metro regions, to achieve zero recovery point objective and near-zero recovery time objective.
SM-S securely protects enterprise application data by generating a mirror image of the data in the logical volume to a remote storage system at a physically separate location. This protection means that in case of any kind of outage, revenue-producing applications continue to serve business functions from the secondary storage system, which instantly takes over operations from the primary.
With the recent release of ONTAP 9.6, here’s what’s new in SnapMirror Synchronous:
- Additional protocol support. SM-S now supports CIFS/SMB 2.0+, NFSv4.0, and NFSv4.1, in addition to FCP, iSCSI, and NFSv3, which were already available in ONTAP 9.5. Also, mixed ONTAP volume security style volumes (for example, CIFS and NFSv3) are now supported.
- SM-S supports cascade relationships; that is, synchronous replication from primary to secondary and asynchronous replication from secondary to tertiary.
- Security for sensitive data in transit using TLS 1.2 encryption.
- Support for hard and soft quotas.
- Support for NetApp FPolicy® file screening policy
SM-S offers the flexibility to protect a subset of volumes in the cluster with replication between ONTAP storage systems that can be of different platforms. That is, SM-S can be set up between FAS and AFF, or between FAS and ONTAP Select, or between AFF and ONTAP Select. SM-S doesn’t require any new or special hardware, software, or networking capabilities, which significantly lowers the overall cost of the solution. SM-S is targeted for relatively short distances of 150 km between the ONTAP storage systems, with less than 10 milliseconds round-trip time.
To learn more about SM-S, check out the videos on the SnapMirror Synchronous playlist. For answers to all your SM-S questions, and to find out how SM-S can help protect your data, contact your local NetApp representative.
Cheryl George
Cheryl George is a Product Manager with over 19 years of experience in the IT industry. She helps build state-of-the-art products and enterprise solutions which help solve real-world customer and business problems. And works on Go-to-Market and Messaging Strategy. Customer engagements is what she enjoys the most. Cheryl is music enthusiast. She maintains her Zen through yoga and mindful walking. She loves to travel but the irony is that it mostly happens in the head.
