NetApp  rolled out the 9^th release of its StorageGRID software, a data management platform that’s designed for petabyte-scale environments used by organizations in the healthcare and financial services industries.

The new version features several improvements, most notably support for the Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) open standard.  The protocol was developed by SNIA to cover provisioning, administering and accessing in the cloud – capabilities that NetApp requires in order to get customers who are already invested in existing, multi-vendor infrastructure to buy its product.

StorageGRID is used to power NetApp Distributed Content Repository deployments, and this latest release offers a number of enhancements to the data retention solution.  A single logical container can now scale to hundreds of petabytes and billions of objects, and depositories of similar scale can be set up for unstructured workloads. This accomplishes  a number of things – it makes the data easier to access and analyze, while also reducing costs. NetApp touts “industry-leading storage density” as another big factor for bottom line-oriented enterprises.

Iron Mountain is a service provider that deals with healthcare customers that make use of StorageGRID. GM Ken Rubin released a statement to underscore some of the new software’s key selling points.

“Our healthcare customers ask us to help them deal with their rising storage volumes, as well as manage the retention and access for their medical imaging data,” Rubin said “.In response to this, we offer a managed service that provides the dual benefit of controlling their storage costs while improving their ability to recover from a disaster. Our service, powered by StorageGRID coupled with the E-Series platform, enables us to deliver our customers cost-effective, long-term storage without compromising security or access.”

NetApp’s previous software update was a couple months ago when it rolled out the latest release of ONTAP. The storage platform is now more secure, efficient and offers more automation for flash-powered use cases.