NetApp is an American technology company that develops storage systems, software, and data management solutions for on-premises and cloud infrastructure. NetApp products are used to store, protect, back up, and move enterprise data, build fault-tolerant systems, and create hybrid cloud environments.
A key part of the company’s ecosystem is ONTAP, a software platform for managing data and storage systems. It is used in NetApp hardware storage systems as well as in software-defined and cloud configurations.
What Is NetApp?
NetApp primarily specializes in enterprise storage and data management infrastructure. The company’s solutions support file and block workloads, while certain products are designed for object storage. ONTAP supports different deployment models, including NetApp storage systems, software-defined storage, and cloud services.
NetApp technologies are used to address several key infrastructure requirements:
- centralized storage of enterprise data
- high availability
- snapshots and data replication
- disaster recovery
- data protection
- automated data tiering
- integration of on-premises and cloud infrastructure
- support for virtualized environments, databases, AI, and other enterprise workloads
Thus, NetApp is not a single storage system or technology but a vendor with an entire ecosystem of hardware and software solutions.
What Is NetApp ONTAP?
ONTAP is NetApp software for storage and data management. It provides a common software layer for different infrastructure configurations and supports both file and block access. In current systems, ONTAP is used on platforms including AFF, AFX, ASA, and FAS.
ONTAP provides functions such as storage organization, data access for applications, fault-tolerance management, snapshots, replication, performance management, and data protection.
It supports various access protocols, including NFS, SMB/CIFS, iSCSI, Fibre Channel, and NVMe/FC.
Main NetApp Storage Systems
NetApp’s current portfolio includes several families of storage systems and software solutions:
- AFF (All Flash FAS) — all-flash systems for high-performance enterprise workloads.
- ASA (All SAN Array) — all-flash platforms designed for block-based SAN workloads.
- FAS — systems supporting flash and disk-based storage configurations.
- AFX — a disaggregated storage system designed for large-scale workloads, including AI.
- StorageGRID — a software-defined object storage platform designed for large volumes of unstructured data.
The specific architecture is selected based on data type, required performance, capacity, and workload characteristics.
How Data Storage Is Organized in NetApp ONTAP
In the classic ONTAP architecture, data is organized across several logical layers. In simplified form, the structure can be represented as follows:
Disks → RAID Groups → Plex → Aggregate → Volume
RAID groups provide data protection through redundancy. One or more RAID groups form a plex, and a plex is part of an aggregate, which acts as a pool of storage resources.
Volumes are created on aggregates and provide logical storage space for data. This multi-layer architecture separates the physical organization of drives from the logical resources made available to applications.
The specific internal architecture depends on the generation and type of system. For example, modern ASA r2 systems use a specialized ONTAP storage model, so the traditional aggregate/plex terminology does not apply to all current platforms in the same way.
NetApp Fault Tolerance
NetApp uses multiple layers of protection to improve availability. Depending on the system architecture, these may include RAID, controller redundancy, synchronous mirroring, replication, and other mechanisms.
One such technology is SyncMirror. It maintains two synchronous copies of an aggregate on separate sets of disks. Each copy is called a plex.
If one copy becomes unavailable due to certain hardware failures, the other may preserve access to the data. SyncMirror is also used as a component of more complex fault-tolerant configurations.
For protection against site-level failures, NetApp also provides MetroCluster technologies, while the SnapMirror family of technologies is used for data replication between systems. MetroCluster continues to be supported and developed in current ONTAP 9 releases.
Snapshots and Data Replication
ONTAP supports Snapshot copies, which are point-in-time logical copies of data states. They preserve previous data states and can be used for recovery after information is deleted or modified.
SnapMirror is used for data transfer and replication. It can maintain copies of data on another system or site and is used in Disaster Recovery and other data protection architectures.
These mechanisms serve a different purpose from RAID. RAID primarily provides resilience against certain drive failures, while snapshots and replication help protect and recover data in a broader range of scenarios.
NetApp in Cloud Infrastructure
NetApp technologies are available not only in physical storage systems. ONTAP can also be used in private, public, and hybrid cloud environments.
Options include Cloud Volumes ONTAP, Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, Azure NetApp Files, and Google Cloud NetApp Volumes. These services allow organizations to use NetApp storage technologies beyond their own data centers and build hybrid architectures.
ONTAP also supports FabricPool for automatically moving less frequently accessed data to object storage. This approach makes it possible to combine a high-performance storage tier with a more cost-efficient object storage tier.
Where NetApp Is Used
NetApp solutions are used in enterprise data centers, cloud infrastructure, and environments with high requirements for data availability and management.
Typical use cases include storage for business applications and databases, virtualization, file services, backup, Disaster Recovery, hybrid clouds, container environments, analytics, HPC, and AI workloads.
The choice of a specific product depends on the required type of data access, performance and availability requirements, where the data needs to reside, and how it needs to be protected.