What is Cloud Volumes?

NetApp^® Cloud Volumes ONTAP^® data management software delivers control, protection, and efficiency to your data with the flexibility of the cloud. Cloud Volumes ONTAP, a cloud-based data management service built on NetApp ONTAP storage software, offers a superior universal storage platform that addresses your cloud data needs. Having the same storage operating system in the cloud and on your premises extends the value of your data fabric without having to train your IT staff in all-new methods to manage your data.

Cloud Volumes ONTAP provides a data storage solution on AWS, Azure, and Google that fits many different customer requirements. These requirements range from disaster recovery, development, and test environments to critical applications that require highly available nondisruptive operation, such as production business applications and file services using NFS and SMB. Cloud Volumes ONTAP is deployed and managed from NetApp Cloud Manager as a software-only solution on cloud compute instances managing cloud storage. This capability enables you to build a virtual storage solution directly on cloud resources.

Building your cloud storage environment on Cloud Volumes ONTAP provides advanced data management features for your cloud storage. ONTAP allows you to provision both NAS and SAN storage for your application environment with SMB, NFS, and iSCSI support. You also get zero-impact NetApp Snapshot™ copies that provide near-instantaneous point-in-time backup and recovery copies of your data without consuming additional storage resources or affecting your application performance.

Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP is a native AWS managed service powered by NetApp technology that eliminates the administrative overheard of setting up and provisioning file servers and storage volumes. Leveraging a full suite of enterprise data services and driven by industry-leading multiprotocol support for Linux, Windows, and iSCSI instances, Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP customers can migrate, accelerate, analyze, and protect more mission-critical applications.

Customers can consume NetApp ONTAP in AWS just as they’ve consumed it on premises. AWS has collaborated with NetApp, allowing customers to migrate and run primary applications, extend on-premises environments to cloud for backup and disaster recovery, develop and test faster, and launch born-in-the-cloud applications.

This feature-rich, AWS native cloud storage is fine-tuned to provide you with proven enterprise-grade data performance and management capabilities, typically found in the data center.

Enterprise customers have access to a world-class file and block service on AWS and can leverage NetApp’s suite of enterprise-grade data services like backup, cross-region replication, caching, tiering, and compliance—all running as an AWS native experience. 

Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP supports industry-proven capabilities, performance, APIs, and data management features (such as NetApp SnapMirror^®, FlexClone^®, and FlexCache^®) while also achieving unmatched performance with analytics, compliance, compute optimization, and enterprise data efficiencies.

Azure NetApp Files is an Azure service, delivered by Microsoft and built on NetApp’s industry-leading ONTAP technology. The service allows customers to move their NFS file-share workloads into Azure—even legacy applications—without rearchitecting their applications. Users can reduce their cloud migration from months or years, to days or weeks.

Azure NetApp Files can be provisioned and managed seamlessly within the Azure portal. It has the same billing, CLI, and deployment paradigm as any other Azure service; the dedicated environment in Azure means that performance is both optimal and assured.

Azure NetApp Files eliminates the need for time-consuming and expensive architectural change, delivering an easy way to seamlessly provision file-based workloads in Azure and helping organizations to meet their cloud mandate in record time.

With Azure NetApp Files, any file-based workload can move to Azure, including NFS v3 and even SMB, with no change. To increase storage, simply add multiple levels of guaranteed performance seamlessly through the Azure portal—and change performance level on the fly without moving data or creating any new volumes.

NetApp and Google have united their strengths to deliver Google Cloud NetApp Volumes—a fully managed storage service in Google Cloud based on NetApp ONTAP data management software and industry-leading storage management technology.

Google Cloud NetApp Volumes pairs the flexibility of the cloud with comprehensive data protection to deliver high-performance, enterprise-grade storage with multiprotocol file support. Swiftly lift and optimize business-critical apps and Windows, VMware, Linux, and SAP workloads into Google Cloud without refactoring code or redesigning processes.

Google Cloud NetApp Volumes provides continuous data availability with the highest level of data protection for even the most demanding workloads. As storage needs change, tier-based solutions allow instant performance changes, easy cloud optimization, and less overprovisioning.