NetApp Insight: NetApp Getting Serious About Cloud

The recent NetApp Insight conference in Las Vegas, NV, with a few thousands people was the opportunity for the company to demonstrate its cloud strategy.

Multiple product launches, new releases and cloud service provider agreements strengthen NetApp cloud presence and messages. The company illustrates its mutation to a cloud software model from an end-to-end approach with persistent memory model on one side and cloud adoption on the other side.

As George Kurian, CEO, says “Speed is the new Scale”. NetApp has made a lot of announcements around Cloud, Data Fabric and DevOps:

• Cloud Insights is a SaaS-based monitoring and cost control with Kubernetes and microservices integration.
• ONTAP 9.5 supports NVMe, provides improved performance with new cache mode, MAX Data, unified data management across flash, disk and cloud, tiering to on-premise or cloud-based object stores.
• MAX Data, supported with ONTAP 9.5, is a persistent memory approach for application-level data with memory-like (tier 0) ultra-low predictable latency and flash-like capacity with auto-tiering to FAS product line. It comes from the Plexistor acquisition made in 1H17.
• HCI adds two new compute nodes – H410C from 8 to 40 cores and H610 with GPUs – and works with SnapMirror.
• Trident, NetApp automated storage provisioner for Docker, Kubernetes, and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, now supports of NetApp HCI, ONTAP, SolidFire and NetApp Cloud Volume Service.
• StorageGRID receives a new iteration with SG6060 with new controller and support of Flash and FabricPool.
• Cloud Volumes Services is a SaaS-based fully-managed file storage solution with multi-protocol file services available on AWS and GCP. It is in preview mode on Azure and renamed Azure NetApp Files.
• Cloud Volume ONTAP can now spans on-premise and AWS or Azure with high-availability capabilities and data auto-tiering from on-premise to cloud with the Cloud Tiering Service.
• SaaS Backup is a new offering to support Office 365 today and soon Salesforce. See the other dedicated article about this growing need.
• Data Availability Services is a new data protection method to send data to the cloud with the option to reuse data in the cloud.
• FlexPod receives new support services and
• Finally new Hybrid Cloud Certifications.

Partners were also actively present at the expo floor during this show and we noticed some interesting presence: Data Dynamics, Commvault who announced a new NetApp partnership during its recent GO conference, Peer Software, Scale Logic, Point Software and Systems, Komprise, Talon, Veeam with the update 4 of its Backup & Replication with native integration with NetApp HCI and SolidFire and Cleondris.