Hello ATEC Group Blog Readers! It’s Allison from Marketing here. Every month, I’ll be interviewing a member of our knowledgeable sales team to learn about the newest and most exciting technology solutions offered by our partners.
This month, we’re speaking with Lisa Seguin, Senior Account Executive and NetApp Product Champion, about NetApp ONTAP 9.
AS: To kick off the interview, can you explain exactly what NetApp’s ONTAP acronym stands for?
LS: According to NetApp, it’s not what the acronym stands for that actually matters, but the inspiration behind it. Believe it or not, the ONTAP acronym really was inspired by beer! The idea behind NetApp ONTAP is that data should flow freely, just like beer through a tap. Can you imagine a beer infrastructure that allows you to pour your favorite drink from any faucet at any sink? That’s what NetApp ONTAP offers for data: data wherever and whenever you need it.
AS: Can you tell us a little bit more about the upgraded performance of NetApp ONTAP 9?
LS: NetApp ONTAP implementations run on NetApp (FAS) or All-Flash FAS (AFF) appliances, on commodity hardware using ONTAP Select, and in private, public, or hybrid clouds. Together these implementations form the basic framework of the NetApp data fabric, offering a software-defined approach to data management and fast, efficient replication across platforms. Customers have told us that their replication to remote locations is much faster with ONTAP 9 when compared to previous ONTAP versions.
Storage virtualization is another huge benefit of ONTAP 9. Like a virtual machine running on a hypervisor, a Storage Virtual Machine (SVM) is a logical entity that abstracts physical resources and serves data to clients and hosts. Data accessed through the SVM is not bound to a location in storage and network access to the SVM is not bound to a physical port.
NetApp ONTAP 9 also allows users to utilize aggregates to isolate workloads with different performance demands, to tier data with different access patterns, and to segregate data for regulatory purposes.
AS: Can you expand on the cost-effectiveness of ONTAP 9?
LS: ONTAP 9 features a new inline data compaction technology, which reduces flash costs by compacting multiple small data transactions into 4K block boundaries, delivering 2x -3x storage efficiency for some workloads.
The data reduction comes with a FlashAdvantage 3-4-5 program, and is based on new and patented inline data compaction. It makes its all-flash FAS arrays extremely cost-effective when compared to hard disk drive-based systems. This leads to a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and potentially lower prices on a $/TB acquisition basis after data reduction as well.
AS: What makes ONTAP 9 a better choice than other competitor solutions on the market?
LS: There really is no other storage operating system in the world that meets such a wide range of needs. While NetApp competitors only offer storage silos, customers that are running ONTAP 9 across different platforms have the ability to manage their data across flash, cloud, and disk resources with common tools for blocks, files, and objects.
AS: Why choose ATEC Group to assist with ONTAP 9 installation?
LS: If you can’t tell by now, here at ATEC Group we evangelize the benefits of NetApp any chance we get. We’ve been offering NetApp solutions for over 14 years and our engineers are the best in the business. I’m passionate about the product and genuinely enjoy working with customers to determine their individualized data storage needs and how we can help them to do more with less by utilizing the efficiencies of NetApp ONTAP 9.
Interested in connecting with Lisa to learn more about ONTAP 9? Reach out to her 
This is actually useful, thanks.