ONTAP 9.1 has been GA since January 2017

Back in January 2017, ONTAP 9 GA was released.  It is loaded with new features. Over the last five months I have delivered solutions on hardware that is part of NetApp's biggest Hardware Platform refresh in its history. Deployments included the FAS2620, FAS2650, FAS8200, A300, A700. These new platforms are all powered by ONTAP 9.1. The feedback has been overwhelming positive.

What are my customers saying?

• 50% Performance improvement.  9.1 supporting more CPU cores, more memory, and higher Ethernet and Fibre Channel has made a huge difference in their workload performance.
• Simplicity Onboard encryption key management and setting up AFF in <10 minutes has simplified the deployment.
• Flexibility They can now encrypt data on storage with standard SSDs and HDDs.  Data on existing systems can be encrypted using volume move. Unique protection for every data volume delivers the flexibility they need to better meet their requirements. 

Some of the major features:

• System Manager improvements include FlexGroup GUI, storage efficiency reporting, and a new cluster setup workflow.
• NetApp Volume Encryption (NVE)
• 12 Node SAN Clusters
• Native Foreign LUN Import with AFF support
• 32 GB FC
• 40 GB Ethernet
• FlexGroup massively scalable containers 20PB, 400 billion files, 200 constituents
• Mobile Autosupport (Storage efficiency display, Capacity forecasting, Performance monitoring)

Software Defined Storage:

ONTAP Cloud:

ONTAP running in a hyperscaler service provider environment

• Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Azure

License model designed for cloud consumption mentality

Use cases:

• Cloud replication/DR
• Dev/test, file services, database applications

ONTAP Select:

ONTAP running on-premise on commodity hardware

• NetApp-qualified major server vendors

Flexible capacity-based licensing

Use cases:

• Primary storage for Tier 2 and 3 workloads
• Private cloud storage services
• Disaster recovery/secondary storage

Upgrade Advisor can be found here:

Good luck!