This page provides an overview of Google Cloud NetApp Volumes and how it works.
About NetApp Volumes
NetApp Volumes is a fully managed, cloud-based data storage service that provides advanced data management capabilities and highly scalable performance.
NetApp Volumes helps to accelerate deployment times while lowering costs, manage your workloads and applications, and migrate workloads to the cloud without sacrificing the performance or features associated with traditional on-premises storage.
You can use NetApp Volumes to move file-based applications to Google Cloud with support for Network File System (NFSv3 and NFSv4.1) and Server Message Block (SMB) 2.1, 3.0, and 3.1.1 protocols without re-architecting your applications, while you continue to get persistent storage for your applications.
NetApp Volumes differences from Cloud Volumes Service
The difference between Cloud Volumes Service, which is a third-party offering of NetApp services, and NetApp Volumes is that NetApp Volumes is a first-party, fully managed and integrated data storage service provided by Google Cloud.
Key features
NetApp Volumes offers the following features:
Fully-managed service: provides fully managed service with NoOps, integrated with the Google Cloud console.
Volume provisioning: provisions volumes from 100 GiB to 100 TiB in seconds.
Multiprotocol support: supports NFSv3, NFSv4.1, and SMB 2.1, 3.0, and 3.1.1 protocols.
Automated snapshots: protects data with automated, efficient snapshots.
Volume replication: enables business continuity with asynchronous volume replication across Google Cloud.
High availability: provides high availability with options for multi-region redundancy, backed by the NetApp Volumes service level agreement.
Rapid cloning: accelerates application development with rapid cloning.
NetApp Volumes enables you to quickly build and deploy both Windows and UNIX-based applications. You can both schedule and restore snapshots of your NetApp Volumes to help keep your data protected. You can also use snapshots to quickly create copies of your volumes with existing datasets and iterate testing in the development lifecycle—from development to staging—and then to production.
NetApp Volumes supports the following features:
| Features | Details and support |
|---|---|
| Storage pools | |
| Service levels | Two service levels, Premium (64 MiB/s throughput per TiB) and Extreme (128 MiB/s throughput per TiB). Both service levels reach up to 4.5 GiB/s throughput |
| Volumes | |
| High availability | Zonal with CRR option |
| Granular resizing | Yes (Can increase and decrease in 1 GiB increments) |
| Volume snapshots | Up to 255 snapshots per volume |
| Volume clones | Yes |
| Volume revision | Yes |
| Volume backup | Snapshots and third-party file-based backup |
| Protocols | |
| SMB version support | SMB 2.1, 3.0, and 3.1.1 |
| SMB workgroup mode | Only domain mode |
| SMB access-based enumeration | Yes |
| SMB3 encryption | Yes |
| SMB3 continuously available (CA) shares | MS-SQL and FSlogix |
| SMB3 Multichannel | Yes |
| NFS version support | NFSv3 and NFSv4.1 (TCP/UDP) |
| NFS extended group support | Yes |
| NFSv4.1 security identifiers | Yes |
| NFSv4.1 numeric IDs | Yes |
| NFSv4.1 ACLS | Yes |
| NFSv4.1 Kerberos | krb5, krb5i, krb5p |
| NFSv3 and NFSv4.1 | On same volume |
| SMB and NFSv3 | On same volume |
| SMB and NFSv4.1 | On same volume |
| Active Directory integration | |
| Organizational Unit support | Yes |
| Active Directory site support | Yes |
| LDAP signing and sealing | LDAP signing only, if required by domain controller |
| AES support for Kerberos | Yes |
| Active Directory as LDAP server | NFSv3 and NFSv4.1, RFC2307bis schema |
| Active Directory as Kerberos server | SMB and NFSv4.1 |
| Volume replication | |
| Volume replication to other region | Yes |
| Replication schedules | 10 minutes, 1 hour, and daily intervals |
| Access to destination with active replication | read-only |
| Access to destination with stopped replication | Read-write |
| Replication can be reversed (switch direction) | Yes |
| Snapshots in replication | Yes |
| Networking | |
| Shared VPC support | Yes |
How it works
NetApp Volumes provides fully managed NFS and SMB remote file systems as a service. Service administrators create and manage remote file systems as volumes and share them with NFS and SMB clients over a network.
Clients—usually Compute Engine VMs— mount such volumes and users, and applications on these clients use them to store files. Access to files can be controlled using the native UNIX or Windows permission models.
With volumes, you have access to powerful snapshotting capabilities for multiple snapshot use cases and can replicate volumes to different regions for protection in case of a disaster.
Tools to use NetApp Volumes
You can use Google Cloud NetApp Volumes using the following tools:
Google Cloud SDK: the Google Cloud command line interface allows you to interact with NetApp Volumes through a terminal.
Google Cloud console: the Google Cloud console provides a visual interface that gives you a holistic view of your applications and projects.
NetApp Volumes architecture
NetApp Volumes uses the Google Cloud Private Service Access framework, which creates a private connection linking your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) to the NetApp Volumes VPC. The Google Cloud private service access framework assigns private addresses (RFC 1918) or non-private addresses (non-RFC 1918) to it using Service Networking API and VPC peering constructs.
Network peering
Network peering is integrated in the storage pool creation workflow. All volumes in a pool are accessible from Network-attached storage (NAS) clients on the same VPC, but are subject to NAS access control. For shared VPCs, this enables data access across different projects. You can't attach a single volume or pool to multiple VPCs.
Independent of data access at the VPC level, all resources belong only to the project they're created in and can only be managed within that project. Identity and Access Management (IAM) protects management access.
Regional availability
NetApp Volumes is available in several regions. For details about regional availability, see Global Regions for NetApp Volumes.
Use cases for NetApp Volumes
NetApp Volumes expedites the deployment of various cloud-based applications through the rapid provisioning of shared file services and offers a rich set of storage management features. Primary use cases include file services, DevOps, and databases.
File services
NetApp Volumes is a fault-tolerant, scalable storage platform for creating a cloud-based file system that you can access with standard NFS or SMB protocols. With its high performance capabilities, NetApp Volumes delivers enterprise-level network-attached storage solutions on Google Cloud that are similar to an on-premises experience, which include the following complete range of supporting features:
Read-only and read-write client access control
Connections over both NFSv3 and NFSv4.1 protocols
Active Directory (AD) integration and SMB connections
You can use file services as you migrate workloads or create new applications in Google Cloud. For example, you can use an SMB share to support individual user or group file sharing across Windows clients. You can also use SMB share to support file and profile sharing for virtual desktops. Alternatively, you can use NFS or SMB volumes to share files between your applications, or as a backup destination.
NetApp Volumes helps you migrate existing workloads to Google Cloud and provides you with a platform to develop and maintain a file storage solution in the cloud, which reduces hardware, procurement time, cooling, and power use and minimizes physical space.
Enterprise applications
You can rehost your traditional applications which are currently deployed on-premises to NetApp Volumes. NetApp Volumes continues to preserve their core functionality for file storage workflows. This includes a subset of enterprise applications that typically don't require refactoring.
By using NetApp Volumes, you can create fully managed NFS shares for Linux-based applications and SMB shares for Windows-based applications in seconds. You can scale them up or down for capacity and performance without any impact on your workflows or users.
You can preserve application service delivery life cycles with quick snapshots and copies for development, testing, and staging environments, which further accelerates production releases and minimizes lead times.
Persistent storage for stateful Google Kubernetes Engine applications
NetApp Volumes provides fast, reliable, and persistent storage for your stateful applications that run on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).
Most containerized enterprise applications have state and configuration data that need to be backed by persistent storage. Persistent storage allows your application state and configuration data to remain accessible through rapid container creation and destruction during various application execution sequences such as upgrades, scaling, and rollbacks.
GKE enables you to build, deploy, manage, and run containerized applications. GKE accelerates the development and deployment of highly portable applications through a declarative, self-healing, auto-scaling platform that accelerates the development and deployment of highly portable applications. For more information, see GKE documentation on how to deploy a stateful application.
The following use cases are applicable for stateful applications:
Persistent storage: provides persistent storage for your GKE applications with read-write-many (RWX) access mode or shared access to storage. You can mount persistent volumes as read-write by many nodes at once using the RWX access mode.
Persistent volumes: expands an existing persistent volume after creation.
Provisioned persistent volumes: uses dynamically and statically provisioned persistent volumes.
Label storage volumes: labels storage volumes for better identification and management in multi-cluster environments.
Access to persistent storage through NFSv3 and NFSv4.1: supports access to persistent storage through NFSv3 and NFSv4.1 using a Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver.
Access to persistent storage through SMB: supports access to persistent storage through SMB using an SMB Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver. For more information, see GKE documentation on how to Use SMB CSI driver to access SMB volume on Windows Server nodes.
Databases
You can use NetApp Volumes to quickly access primary databases or snapshot copies of open source or enterprise databases.
NetApp Volumes supports different levels of performance for each file system. Database administrators can allocate individual storage pools for hot or cold data, which allows them to control the use of high-performance and high-capacity storage. You can use NetApp Volumes to ensure file systems are available and resilient against system failures, which simplifies the setup for reliable database services in the cloud.
What's next
Review the NetApp Volumes product overview.