While the actual payload hasn’t hit the street yet, here’s what I can tell you about the latest release in the ONTAP 9 family which should be available here any day now. **EDIT: RC1 is here. 9.4 went GA today.

FabricPool

Lots of improvements to ONTAP’s object-tiering code in this release, it appears they’re really pushing development here:

Support for Azure Blob, both hot and cool tiers, no archive tier support This adds to the already supported AWS-S3 and StorageGRID Webscale object stores

Support for cold-data tiering policies, whereas in 9.2,9.3 it was backup and snapshot-only tiering policies Default definition of cold data is 31 days but can be adjust to anywhere from 2-63 days. Not all cold blocks need to be made hot again, such as snapshot-only blocks. Random reads will be considered application access, declared hot and written back into performance tier whereas sequential reads are assumed to be indexers, virus scanners or other and should be kept cold and therefore will not be written back into performance tier.

Now supported in ONTAP Select, in addition to the existing ONTAP and ONTAP Cloud. Wherever you run ONTAP, you can now run FabricPools, SSD aggregate caveat still exists.

Inactive Data Reporting by OnCommand System Manager to determine how much data would be tiered if FabricPools were implemented. This one will be key to clients thinking about adopting FabricPools

Object Store Profiler is a new tool in ONTAP that will test the performance of the object store you’re thinking of attaching so you don’t have to dive in without knowing what your expected performance should be.

Object Defragmentation now optimizes your capacity tier by reclaiming space that is no longer referenced by the performance tier

Compaction comes to FabricPools ensuring that your write stripes are full as well as applying Compression, Deduplication

Security

A handful of new security features are included in this payload:

Secure Purge: Crypto-shred files

Secure Boot: Prevent access without a key in the event of a reboot.

Validated ONTAP: Ensure your version of ONTAP is verified.

USB OKM: OnBoard Key manager on a USB key (FPVR required)

Efficiencies:

NetApp is constantly striving to improve their myriad efficiency methods and 9.4 is no exception as it adds the following:

Aggregate-level dedupe gets a background scanner for post-process dedupe of existing blocks

Snapshot Block sharing deduped regardless if that block sits in a snapshot or in the active file system. Snapshot limit increased to 1023

All data protection volumes will automatically have all efficiencies enabled, inline and background

Root volumes: These volumes have grown in recent years in order to allow for larger core dump files. Newer platforms will now write this core dump to the onboard boot media, so root volume space requirements will be shrinking in the new platforms. The upcoming A800 platform will only require 150GB root volume, contrary to the current standard of 1TB.

Performance

NVMe over fabric (NVMe-oF, NVMe/FC) is introduced with this release on the latest mid-range and top end AFF platforms; A300, A700s, A700, A800. This will provide < 200 µs of latency. Also, the upcoming AFF A800 will allow for NVMe-attached SSDs, providing end-to-end NVMe connectivity

SMB Multichannel: Allow SMB3 client sessions to use multiple client sessions and CPU cores for greater throughput

Denser drives are on the way, with 30TB SAS SSDs get supported in this release

Simplicity

Rapid disk zeroing – Exactly what it sounds like, anyone who’s done a lot of installs in their day will be happy about this one. Available only on systems shipped with, or re-initialized to 9.4 but not upgraded to.

ONTAP image installation from laptop via OnCommand Systems Manager, no more local web server required.

Application Aware Data Management gains support for Microsoft SQL Server This includes native REST-API support for automated provisioning



Other enhancements

FlexGroups gets FPolicy support Adaptive QoS minimums and maximums



Once again another monster payload which is the new normal with the predictable six month cadence. This is an even-numbered release so remember this is non-LTS version and support will be limited to one year.