NetApp has unveiled NetApp StorageGrid 12.0, a scalable, software-defined object storage solution designed for unstructured data. This latest version will introduce new capabilities designed to enhance AI initiatives, improve data security and modernise organisations’ data infrastructure.
Whether businesses are in the early stages of modernising 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, server logs and more. 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.
“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.”
StorageGrid 12.0 introduces new features designed to strengthen object storage in customers’ intelligent data infrastructure. This includes new capabilities for advanced caching that improve the efficiency and scalability for AI training and other HPC workloads, boosting performance with up to 20x more throughput than before. Additionally, it supports versioning AI datasets with bucket branches. Customers can more easily iterate AI projects at scale, facilitate testing and development workflows, and make their data stores more resilient. This new feature enables users to quickly create space-efficient clones of their object storage buckets to use in their workflows and enable faster recovery in the face of disruption.
Version 12.0 also includes numerous enhancements ranging from better drive firmware upgrades to improved log archiving abilities that are designed to simplify the administrator experience. Administrators can automate drive firmware updates across all nodes, reducing manual labour spent on maintenance tasks.
Updates that increase the security of object storage environments have also been introduced. The solution now supports enhanced encryption standards with AES GCM encryption which 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.
