Evaluation of NetApp Cloud ONTAP and AltaVault using Amazon Web Services

As of now, the storage infrastructure at CERN almost exclusively consists of on-premise storage, i.e. storage which physically resides in the institution’s data center. While this offers certain advantages such as full control regarding data security, it also holds many challenges, most importantly in terms of flexibility and scalability. For instance, the provisioning of new on-site storage takes some time, since the required storage needs to be ordered, delivered, and installed first, before it can be used. Furthermore, there is certain maintenance work involved even after the initial setup inflicting ongoing costs of upkeep. At the same time, various cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure have emerged during the last years, offering services to flexibly provision storage resources in the cloud in a scalable way. This project tries to explore and evaluate to what extend the on-site storage infrastructure at CERN could be extended using virtual NetApp storage offerings such as Cloud ONTAP and AltaVault using AWS in order to provide quick provisioning, unified management and off-site data exchange between the current database infrastructure and the Amazon storage cloud.