Continuing with their new standard six month release cadence, ONTAP 9.2RC1 was released today and I continue to be impressed with the feature payload NetApp has been delivering with each new release; here are the highlights:

• FabricPools
  • Automated cloud-tiering of NetApp Snapshots to a target that speaks S3 (AWS or StorageGrid)
• QoS Floors or minimums
  • Allows you to reserve performance for critical workloads, SAN on AFF only.
• Efficiencies:
  • Inline dedupe at the aggregate level
    • Previously volume-only
    • Not applicable to post-process dedupe
    • AFF only
  • Advanced Disk Partitioning now available on FAS8xxx and FAS9xxx, for the first 48 drives.
• NetApp Volume Encryption
  • Now available for FlexGroups

Here’s the list of supported platforms for ONTAP 9.2:

ONTAP Select, the software-only version of ONTAP gets a few nice improvements as well:

• FlexGroups
• 2-Node HA
• ESX Robo licensing (This is a big deal for me and my customers)

Read the full release notes here.