San Jose-based NetApp has announced NetApp StorageGRID 12.0, its scalable, software-defined S3-compatible object storage solution designed for unstructured data. This latest version of StorageGRID will introduce new capabilities to enhance AI initiatives, improve data security, and modernize organizations’ data infrastructure. The series consists of five new StorageGRID models.
“As the proven industry leader in on-premises object storage, NetApp StorageGRID provides the scalability, cost-effectiveness, and performance needed to feed modern workloads like AI,” said Sandeep Singh, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Enterprise Storage at NetApp. “Our latest updates enable customers to grow their object-based data estates more securely and accelerate workloads so they can focus on putting their data to work.”
Whether businesses are in the early stages of modernizing their data lakes or experimenting with advanced AI applications, they need to manage and store exploding volumes of unstructured data such as text, video, machine and sensor data and server logs. Businesses that want to tap into this growing ocean of data need a secure, cost-effective, and scalable solution, making object storage an essential component of their primary storage environment.
“NetApp StorageGRID use cases have dramatically evolved from backup and archiving to become a cornerstone for a wide array of modern applications,” said Vishnu Vardhan, Director of Product Management and Tech Marketing for NetApp’s Object Storage platform. “StorageGRID now underpins cloud-native applications, serves as scalable primary storage solutions for data lakehouses, analytics, and artificial intelligence and machine learning, and supports content delivery networks with its handling of unstructured object data.”
NetApp StorageGRID 12.0 introduces new features designed to strengthen object storage in customers’ intelligent data infrastructure, including improved Scaling for AI workloads with advanced caching, and advanced scalability and caching that increases performance with up to 20x more throughput than before. Additionally, StorageGRID 12.0 supports versioning AI datasets with bucket branches to more easily iterate AI projects at scale, , and make their data stores more resilient and easy to clone. StorageGRID 12.0 includes simplified management changes ranging from better drive firmware upgrades to improved log archiving abilities.
“With StorageGRID 11.8, we refined the core of the object storage platform, focusing on user experience, security, and manageability,” Vardhan said. “Now you can put the right data in the right place at the right time, thanks to our sophisticated information lifecycle management policy engine. And now this innovative object storage software has been supercharged with the introduction of multiple new StorageGRID appliances.
Enhanced cyber resiliency and security features: StorageGRID 12.0 includes updates that increase the security of object storage environments.
“Object storage is at the centre of the rise of AI,” Vardhan stated. “It is used in every stage of the data pipeline: data ingestion, data prep, model training, and inferencing. Therefore, it is imperative for organizations like yours to manage this critical data securely and cost effectively.”
The solution now supports enhanced encryption standards with AES GCM encryption add integrity checking, stronger on-disk encryption, and default blocking for SSH ports. Customers also more easily support immutable datasets for AI by leveraging the new support for object lock in cross-grid replication.
“The enhancements in StorageGRID 12.0 were developed with two fundamental use cases in mind –object storage that can be used as an AI content repository at scale, and object storage that can be used for AI workloads with speed,” Vardhan stated.
Fast access to object storage is clearly a need in the new world of AI, and NetApp is committed to helping you achieve it.
“As new technologies and solutions evolve, you want solutions that can work with your infrastructure today and with the least amount of developer friction,” Vardhan said. “To this end, StorageGRID implementation has evolved to an inner ring and an outer ring architecture. The inner ring offers high speed and low latency, and it is composed of high-performance S3 caches that can deliver near-line-rate performance for working datasets. The outer ring provides high capacity, high throughput, and high availability, and it can be connected to multiple GPU clusters simultaneously.”
S3 remote direct memory access (RDMA) developments are becoming a clear part of the future of object storage and AI. As S3 RDMA evolves, you want solutions that work with your existing infrastructure and that make your developers’ job easier. RDMA improves data transfer efficiencies in AI/ML environments with optimized throughput and CPU utilization, plus lower latency.
Another aspect to consider is caching.
“Caches are already extensively used in AI workflows, with multiple levels of caching, but they still present challenges,” Vardhan said. They are complex to deploy, from an infrastructure standpoint. They do not enforce a security model that aligns with the rest of the object storage infrastructure. Nor are they integrated, from a data consistency perspective, and your end users need to manage cache eviction and time-to-live rules.
“StorageGRID 12.0 offers something better – an integrated cache that enforces security, provides a simple consistency model, and is easy to deploy,” Vardhan indicated. “Your developers get massively accelerated performance right out of the box. This feature works across your ecosystem of S3 applications without any code or infrastructure modifications.”
The caching layer in StorageGRID 12.0 delivers up to 10 times the performance of current NetApp StorageGRID appliances. This performance can be further scaled up by running the caching layer on a bare-metal StorageGRID node, enabling you to customize the server to meet your specific needs.
To learn about the full set of new capabilities in NetApp StorageGRID 12, visit: https://www.netapp.com/product-updates.