N series storage systems are driven by the Data ONTAP operating system. Data ONTAP is a highly optimized, scalable, and flexible operating system that can handle mixed SAN and NAS environments. Data ONTAP delivers flexible management and high availability, ensures business continuance, and provides data permanence, thereby reducing storage management complexity in your enterprise. Data ONTAP software integrates seamlessly into UNIX, Windows, and web environments and provides the foundation to build your storage infrastructure and an enterprise-wide data fabric for mission-critical business applications. The operating system includes integrated secure access capabilities (SSL, SSH) and System Manager, a web-based administration tool that allows IT administrators to fully manage N series systems from remote locations.
The innovative Data ONTAP architecture delivers scalable performance and a flexible storage environment, that can be applied in many environments ranging from small workgroups to enterprise data centers. Data ONTAP stores and serves applications, consolidates data, and provides reliable data access throughout the enterprise. The Data ONTAP operating system simplifies management and optimizes storage utilization by combining file-system technology and a microkernel design, enabling such features as flexible data management, scalability, and heterogeneous access.
Clustered Data ONTAP is an option of Data ONTAP that provides a scale-out solution allowing customers to gradually increase the performance and capacity of a single name space environment (horizontal scaling) to meet the needs of their organization. This provides a more flexible environment and enables customers to preserve their investment beyond simple capacity scaling (vertical scaling).