What’s new in the StorageGRID object storage family

If you’re looking for a fast, reliable, and scalable object storage solution that can handle your most demanding workloads, you’ve landed on the right page.

Today, I‘m proud to announce the availability of NetApp^® StorageGRID^® 11.7, the latest version of our software-defined object storage solution, and the StorageGRID SGF6112 appliance—the next-generation all-flash appliance for your primary object storage workloads.

In this blog post, I’ll introduce you to some of the new features and capabilities in StorageGRID 11.7 and the new all-flash appliance to power your most demanding workloads.

Let’s start with the software.

This release highlights the first advanced grid federation functionality enabled by cross-grid replication (CGR) and account clone features. CGR targets the disaster recovery use case, replicating objects from one grid instance to a separate grid. This approach is useful if you need to separate your disaster recovery data due to policy, regulation, or compliance requirements. CGR provides a disaster recovery copy and keeps a grid from being affected by a disaster, compromise, or operational failure.

In addition, StorageGRID now lets you clone an account, which makes it easier to exchange account credentials between grids. In a disaster, having the grids populated with the account credentials allows client applications to quickly continue operations on the other grid instance.

In summary:

• Your data is better protected from intentional (malicious) or unintentional actions that might result in data loss.
• You keep your critical data and applications available for operations if a disaster occurs.

Needless to say, security is very important for object storage because it helps protect data from unauthorized access or modifications, including ransomware attacks. Several new improvements and enhancements are included in the new software release.

Governance mode for S3 Object Lock. We’re extending StorageGRID S3 Object Lock functionality by adding governance mode to the existing compliance mode. In governance mode, users can’t overwrite or delete an object version or alter its lock settings unless they have special permissions. With governance mode, you protect objects from being deleted by most users, but you can still grant some users permission to alter the retention settings or delete the object if necessary.

Automatic verification of upgrades with code signing. Code signing is a digital signature added to software and applications to verify that the included code package hasn’t been tampered with after it was signed. StorageGRID administrators use code signing to prove, for instance, that your StorageGRID software, Appliance Installer upgrades, or hot fixes actually came from NetApp, and not from a hacker who is trying to compromise your systems. By using code signing, administrators can also verify that the software package hasn’t been modified since NetApp created it. This release presents an automatic verification of StorageGRID upgrades and hot fixes.

FIPS-ready encrypted load balancer connections. Public sector, government or other regulated organizations also now benefit from the FIPS 140-3–ready cryptographic module for the load balancer traffic. With this technology, data is encrypted and transferred securely and with proper levels of confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity. 

Configurable firewall controls. By configuring firewall controls, enterprises and service providers can effectively manage network traffic by restricting the number of external ports for security and traffic control purposes. They can also modify firewalls (for example, opening or closing ports to external clients) and add trusted IP addresses to the privileged access list.

What’s in it for you:

• Your data is more secure with another layer of data protection.
• You’re safe to deploy StorageGRID upgrades because they’re automatically verified.
• You meet your regulatory obligations and compliance requirements.
• You get flexibility to meet diverse network policies.

One of the things that makes StorageGRID easy to use is its UI.

With new usability enhancements in release 11.7, you now can configure multiple dashboards to suit your workflow needs: for instance, to get insights about performance, storage, or other metrics.

We also added onboarding wizards to set up NetApp ONTAP^® data tiering and other targets for S3-native applications in StorageGRID.

And these aren’t the only improvements and enhancements that the new software offers.

StorageGRID 11.7 also introduces enhanced workflow for creating information lifecycle management (ILM) rules and policies, improvements for Amazon S3 Select (we added Parquet file format support), and some other features.

And last, but not least…

If you ask me for one sentence to describe the newest member of our StorageGRID hardware family, I’d do it like this:

Please meet the new, next-generation, high-performance, efficient, cost-effective, high-density all-flash StorageGRID appliance to store and manage unstructured data at scale.

The new, high-performance, all-flash appliance is a perfect fit for your workloads in which object storage is primary. It’s also an exceptional fit as a performance tier for hot data, and is great for applications that deal with large amounts of data daily and require the highest performance—such as AI, analytics, and data lakes. Thanks to its NVMe-driven high throughput and low latency, you speed up data processing and analysis.

With the SGF6112 appliance, which runs on the latest StorageGRID 11.7 software, you get the newest features, more performance, 50% higher density, and lower latency—all compared to its predecessor—in less rack space and at lower cost.

With the new StorageGRID 11.7 features, customers benefit from advanced capabilities for disaster recovery, enhancements for security and compliance, simplified user experience, high performance with the new next-generation all-flash appliance, and many other significant improvements to manage unstructured data across hybrid cloud environments.

If you’re keen to deep-dive into technical details and learn a bit more about the new features, read the blog from my colleague Tudor Pascu.