Managing enterprise file storage in the cloud has historically presented challenges in balancing performance, capacity, and cost. While robust and reliable storage remains critical, achieving the flexibility and elasticity inherent to cloud environments has often been elusive. This challenge was addressed by Google Cloud NetApp Volumes (GCNV), which integrated NetApp’s ONTAP operating system into the native Google Cloud experience. This offering has significantly enhanced cloud file storage by combining NetApp’s extensive storage expertise with Google Cloud’s unparalleled scale and agility.
A significant advancement in this offering is now being announced.
Today, we are pleased to announce the general availability of the next evolution of Google Cloud NetApp Volumes. This release represents a substantial enhancement, designed to empower organizations with the ability to scale cloud file storage with true cloud-native flexibility and elasticity, while meticulously optimizing cost efficiencies.
Addressing evolving Cloud file storage demands
Since the global introduction of Google Cloud NetApp Volumes - Flex tier last year, market adoption has been strong. Our customers have informed us of several key challenges in the initial offering:
-
Resource inflexibility: The previous unified SKU tightly coupled capacity and performance, often leading to over-provisioning and suboptimal cost efficiency.
-
Scalability limitations: Customers needed more granular control over performance, the ability for dynamic bursting to handle unpredictable fluctuations, and support for significantly larger volumes to simplify management of expanding datasets.
-
Cost optimization: A consistent imperative for all organizations was the ability to optimize costs without compromising performance or capability.
In response to this comprehensive feedback, the latest enhancements to Google Cloud NetApp Volumes have been engineered to directly address these challenges.
Key Enhancements in Google Cloud NetApp Volumes
This significant advancement introduces a suite of powerful new capabilities directly aligned with customer requirements:
-
Flexibility and scalability: Organizations now possess the ability to scale performance and capacity independently, eliminating the constraints of rigid configurations.
-
Granular capacity scaling:
-
Storage pools can be initiated as small as 1 TiB and expanded up to 300 TiB, in precise 1 TiB increments.
-
Individual volumes can range from 1 GiB to 300 TiB, with granular 1 GiB increment control.
-
To facilitate rapid deployment, the initial 1 TiB of volume capacity comes with 64 MiBps throughput and 1,000 IOPS at no extra cost – perfect for kicking off app development or proof-of-concept initiatives. (Note: The ability to scale down capacity is not currently supported; therefore, growth planning should account for future requirements.)
-
-
Independent performance scaling:
-
Throughput can be adjusted in fine-grained 1 MiBps increments, up to a maximum of 5 GiBps per volume.
-
Critically, throughput can also be scaled down as required, ensuring that organizations only incur costs for consumed resources.
-
Achieve up to 160,000 IOPS per volume, with an included allocation of 16 IOPS for every MiBps of provisioned throughput.
-
Consistently low latency, typically in the 2-3 ms range, can be expected for demanding applications.
-
-
-
Superior cost efficiency: The revamped GCNV pricing model reduces capacity pricing and the introduction of independent provisioning for capacity and performance, enabling organizations to precisely right-size their file storage deployments and eliminate over-provisioning.
-
Highly competitive GCNV Flex tier pricing: The new pricing model for GCNV Flex tier significantly enhances cost-efficiency.
-
Capacity is now offered at a compelling $0.105 per GiB/month.
-
Throughput is priced at $1.6 per MiB/month.
-
This throughput rate includes a generous allocation of 16 IOPS per provisioned MiB.
-
The first 64 MiB of throughput and 1,000 IOPS are provided free of charge per storage pool.
-
-
IOPS are priced at a low $0.017 per IOP/month.
-
Please note that actual regional pricing may vary. For complete and up-to-date pricing details, please refer to the official Google Cloud NetApp Volumes pricing page.
-
-
Right-sized resource allocation: Costly over-provisioning is mitigated by enabling precise resource tailoring at the time of provisioning and subsequent incremental growth only when necessary. The ability to provision capacity and performance independently ensures that organizations do not incur costs for unutilized bundled resources.
-
Zero downtime scaling: All dynamic scaling operations occur without interruption to storage access or client connections.
-
Committed Use Discounts: Organizations can leverage Committed Use Discounts (CUDs) for additional savings on their deployments.
-
Intelligent storage tiers: Upcoming automatic tiering support, currently in preview, will further reduce costs by intelligently migrating infrequently accessed data to more economical storage tiers.
-
Ideal use cases for enhanced GCNV
These new capabilities are particularly well-suited for a diverse range of demanding workloads:
-
Applications with specific performance profiles:
-
High-Throughput Applications: Applications requiring over 2 GiBps per volume, especially those targeting Extreme/Premium service levels, are exceptionally well-supported.
-
Burst-oriented workloads: Ideal for managing seasonal peaks or short periods of intense activity, allowing performance to be scaled up when needed and scaled down during off-peak periods.
-
Capacity-lean, performance-intensive applications: Perfect for applications demanding high speed without requiring extensive storage capacity, eliminating unnecessary capacity expenditures.
-
High availability, high performance: Provides robust zone failure protection without compromising on performance.
-
Small footprint, high IOPS: Suited for applications requiring minimal capacity but a high volume of I/O operations per second.
-
Entry-level high performance: Enables high-performance capabilities for entry-level applications, even with an initial deployment of just 1 TiB.
-
-
Modernized traditional enterprise applications: Many established enterprise workloads can significantly benefit from this enhanced flexibility and power:
-
VMware applications: Facilitates the smooth operation of home directories and other VMware-based workloads. Infrastructure right-sizing ensures that virtual machines are allocated only the resources they truly need, reducing waste. Bursting capabilities can accommodate peak demands without over-provisioning for consistent performance.
-
High-Performance Computing (HPC): Accelerates research, complex simulations, and data analytics that crave high throughput and low latency. Bursting for performance allows compute-intensive jobs to temporarily access vast resources, ensuring rapid completion. Higher scale capabilities enable the processing of larger and more complex datasets with greater efficiency.
-
Media and entertainment: Streamline video editing, rendering, and content distribution pipelines that demand massive bandwidth. Higher scale and bursting capabilities are crucial for handling large media files and supporting concurrent processing during production peaks. Infrastructure right-sizing ensures resources align with fluctuating project needs.
-
Electronic Design Automation (EDA): Speed up design and verification workflows with lightning-fast file access. Higher scale is vital for managing the millions of files and complex simulations inherent in chip design, reducing overall cycle times. Infrastructure right-sizing optimizes resource allocation for specific EDA tools, improving efficiency.
-
Databases: Reliably store database backups and logs with scalable capacity and performance on demand. Infrastructure right-sizing helps avoid over-provisioning for typical database operations, while higher scale supports large datasets and high transaction volumes. Bursting can handle sudden query spikes or critical backup windows.
-
Software development: Provide agile and responsive shared file systems for your development and testing environments. Bursting for performance enables rapid compilation and testing during critical phases, accelerating release cycles. Infrastructure right-sizing ensures development environments are cost-effective while offering sufficient resources for diverse tasks.
-
SAP shared files: Efficiently manage shared files for your critical SAP landscapes. Higher scale ensures ample capacity and consistent performance for growing SAP environments and increasing user loads. Infrastructure right-sizing optimizes the underlying storage for various SAP components, leading to better cost control.
-
PACS deployments: Optimize storage performance and cost for storage-hungry Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) deployments. Infrastructure right-sizing ensures that storage resources align with the specific demands of medical imaging data, preventing unnecessary expenditure. Higher scale supports vast archives of images and bursting capabilities can handle sudden influxes of new studies or simultaneous access by multiple clinicians, maintaining diagnostic efficiency. Furthermore, the capability to create large namespaces within a single volume significantly reduces the management burden associated with provisioning and overseeing numerous smaller volumes for extensive medical imaging datasets.
-
This release represents a transformative step in cloud enterprise file storage. We anticipate that organizations will leverage these new capabilities to unlock levels of efficiency and performance.