At the recent Google Cloud Next event, NetApp and Google Cloud announced enhancements to Google Cloud NetApp Volumes, their fully managed file storage service. The updates focus on increasing scalability, performance, and integration capabilities while reducing complexity for enterprise workloads.

Key improvements include throughput increases to 30GiBps for Premium and Extreme service levels, independent scaling of capacity and performance for the Flex service level, integration with Google Cloud’s Vertex AI Platform, and support for Google Cloud Assured Workloads.

Key Enhancements

The announcement introduces four major capability enhancements to Google Cloud NetApp Volumes:

Performance Improvements for Premium and Extreme Service Levels

• Throughput Increase: Up to 30GiBps throughput for large-capacity volumes.
• Volume Scaling: Single volumes starting at 15TiB can scale up to 1PiB
• Regional Availability: Generally available in all 14 regions where Premium and Extreme service levels are offered.
• Benefit: Eliminates the need to partition data across multiple volumes for petabyte-scale datasets.

Flex Service Level Enhancements

• Independent Scaling: Separate provisioning of storage performance and capacity.
• Performance Metrics:
  • Throughput: Up to 5GiBps.
  • IOPS: Up to 160K.
• Resource Optimization: Performance capabilities independent of volume capacity.
• Cost Efficiency: Prevents overprovisioning by enabling granular capacity and performance management.

Integration with Google Cloud Vertex AI

• Direct Data Access: Use data stored in NetApp Volumes directly in the Vertex AI Platform.
• Custom AI Agents: Build agents without creating copies of data or custom data pipeline solutions.
• RAG Applications Support: Simplified data management for retrieval augmented generation applications.
• Data Efficiency: Reduces data sprawl and unnecessary duplication.

Google Cloud Assured Workloads Support

• Compliance Framework: Support for Google Cloud’s Assured Workloads framework.

• Regional Compliance: Meets data residency requirements specific to customer regions.
• Security Features: Transparent access control and cloud key management solution compliance.
• Simplified Management: Easier configuration of environments operating within specific compliance regimes.

Impact to IT Practitioners

The new capabilities for Google Cloud NetApp Volumes promises to bring several benefits to IT organizations:

• Reduced administrative overhead through single large-capacity volumes instead of managing multiple smaller volumes.
• Simplified scaling for high-performance workloads.
• More efficient resource allocation with independent performance and capacity provisioning.
• Decreased infrastructure management complexity.

The capabilities also open the door to new cost impacts:

• Lower cloud costs through reduced wait times for data-intensive operations.
• Elimination of capacity overprovisioning to meet performance requirements.
• More precise resource allocation with granular control over throughput, IOPS, and capacity.
• Potential reduction in storage costs through optimization of the Flex service level.

Analysis

The enhancements to Google Cloud NetApp Volumes address key limitations in previous versions by enabling greater throughput, more flexible resource provisioning, and deeper integration with Google Cloud’s AI services.

These enhancements provide compelling reasons for organizations with demanding workloads like EDA, AI model training, or large content repositories to consider Google Cloud NetApp Volumes as a primary storage solution.

The ability to independently scale performance and capacity with the Flex service level addresses a common cloud storage challenge of overprovisioning, potentially leading to cost optimization.

The most substantial impact may come from integrating with Google Cloud’s Vertex AI Platform, allowing NetApp Volumes to play a key role in AI data pipelines. As enterprises bring their AI solutions to the cloud—a growing differentiator for Google Cloud overall—the capabilities NetApp brings to the equation could be a decisive factor. It’s a strong offering.

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