Element Software 11.0 Brings Greater Flexibility and Protection to NetApp HCI and SolidFire

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NetApp^® Element Software, the magic powering both our NetApp HCI and NetApp SolidFire^® infrastructures, releases its newest edition today. With Element 11.0, NetApp HCI and SolidFire deployments continue to be more flexible, protected, and simple.

As part of our announcements at Insight Las Vegas, customers leveraging both Element 11.0 and ONTAP 9.5 can benefit from data mobility between clouds, on and off premise, with SnapMirror across the NetApp Data Fabric. This hybrid multi-cloud experience enables your organization to embrace the cloud regardless of where it and your team are on their cloud journey. With the Data Fabric, your data can flow seamlessly between these clouds—public and private, on and off premises—bridging the gap between today’s infrastructure and tomorrow’s vision for your data. Tomorrow’s vision is possible today. If you missed out on this exciting addition, you can read more about the different use cases SnapMirror enables across the Data Fabric.

But Element 11.0 is more than an enabler of cloud-vision. Today, Element software also introduces new functionality for our NetApp HCI customers with Protection Domains. Protection domains are important for storage clusters using shared chassis, which specifically offers more monitoring and data protection to our NetApp HCI deployments reducing single points of failure within a shared chassis. Protection domains improve storage availability at scale, precisely what Element software has been designed for from the beginning. At full scale (that’s up to 40 storage nodes in a single cluster), customers will likely experience double availability over current availability rates. Capacity can now be monitored at the domain level or the node level too.

Element software will automatically detect NetApp HCI chassis and the node configuration, with a minimum of three domains needed for Protection Domains to be effective for failback. Element’s double-helix data layout ensures data blocks span the domains. With data distributed evenly across multiple storage chassis, Element software can automatically heal from certain types of chassis failures, and alert you when automatic healing is not possible. You can also use the Element API to integrate with third-party monitoring tools to inform you of protection status. Element Protection Domains are the first step towards enabling full rack domains and greater geo-resillent configurations.

What else is new in Element software?

In addition to further integrations into the Data Fabric with SnapMirror replication from Element software to Cloud Volumes ONTAP and the addition of Protection Domains, both for large scale growth, Element 11.0 also introduces:

The ability to manage storage clusters running Element software on IPv6 networks. You can configure an IPv6 address as the default management IP address or in addition to an IPv4 management addresses to support dual-stack network designs.
16TiB volume support. Element 11.0 doubles the maximum volume size from 8TiB to 16TiB. It is fully supported in the API, the user-interface, and vCenter Plugin.
QoS histograms to better understand your environment. Element 11.0 provides APIs to measure QoS performance for individual volumes on your storage cluster. You can generate per-volume QoS histograms to better understand your storage cluster’s use of QoS in your environment. Additional histograms also enable you to measure IO size per volume.

To see how Element software can better your hybrid-cloud environment, learn more about the hybrid, multi-cloud experience or dive deeper in the Element software page.

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