NetApp Keystone Flex Subscription 2.1

By David Liu, product manager, Keystone Program, NetApp Inc.

For almost 30 years, NetApp, Inc. has focused on your data and today works continuously to improve how it’s managed, stored, analyzed, protected, and moved. We started with traditional on-premises storage models that required significant upfront capital investments.

Later, we added a portfolio of cloud data services, fon-demand and based on Opex. We then realized that we needed to fill the gap between the 2 models, so our customers could have cloud like experiences on premises. Hence, the creation of the NetApp Keystone portfolio, a bridge to the cloud.

On the 1-year anniversary of the general availability of NetApp Keystone Flex Subscription, we announce Flex Subscription 2.1. This release delivers new features for service providers, a partner-delivered FlexPod as-a-service solution, additional cloud support, a live demo, and integration with Equinix, Inc. colocation services. I’ll go into more details on the new features in this blog post, and you can read about the Equinix partnership and joint hybrid cloud solution here.

For service providers
Service providers are discovering the value of consumption-based business models for new storage solutions. They need to invest in storage solutions that are flexible, scalable, and Opex-based, and that take advantage of multi-tenant storage capabilities to deliver cost-competitive services. With this release, service providers can host multiple end customers (or tenants) in a single subscription. In addition, new role-based access controls for end customers can help facilitate tenant management and reporting.

Previously, service providers were limited and had to host a single tenant to a single Flex Subscription service. It was a 1:1 relationship. To provision multiple tenants, service providers had to create various domains of the Flex Subscription service, which was inefficient and time consuming.

With Flex Subscription 2.1, service providers can host the storage service centrally and allow their tenants to subscribe to the service. With this new capability, service providers can more effectively utilize their resources and rapidly deploy new tenants. Now, it is a 1 : Many relationship.

Features in Flex Subscription 2.1 include:

Multitenancy: enables data and configuration segregation in a shared Flex Subscription storage infrastructure
Tenant management: create subscriptions to onboard new tenants by defining the service levels, committed capacities, and terms
Enhanced role-based access control (RBAC): new user roles to differentiate between the service provider and the tenants
Reporting: a global dashboard view of tenants and individual tenant views for billing

Partner-delivered FlexPod-as-a-service
Cisco recently announced Cisco Plus, its portfolio of hybrid-cloud-as-a-service solutions. By using Cisco Plus and NetApp Keystone Flex Subscription, FlexPod certified partners can now deliver a full-stack data center infrastructure as an on-premises service. Put simply, our partners can now take the Lego building blocks of Cisco Plus and Flex Subscription and deliver FlexPod-as-a-service. This service offering comes with a unified contract, single invoice, and single vendor support for compute, networking, security, and storage, all with flexible terms.

With an history of success, NetApp and Cisco have entrusted qualified partners to design, deliver, and support FlexPod solutions, now available as-a-service. This Opex-based, integrated FlexPod service offers end customers an agile and flexible as-a-service solution.

Additional cloud support
Flex Subscription 2.1 now can support NetApp Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud and Cloud Volumes Service for AWS in addition to Azure NetApp Files. You can now manage subscribed services on premises and orchestrate, provision, and modify Cloud Volumes Service in the 3 biggest clouds from a single console.

Note: Subscriptions to Cloud Volumes Services are managed outside Flex Subscription. You’ll need to provide the relevant credentials to the Flex Subscription console to allow connections to the cloud services.

Get live demo of NetApp Keystone Flex Subscription
NetApp Lab on Demand has a live demo called Getting Started with NetApp Keystone Flex Subscription v1.0. You can now log in to Flex Subscription’s management console, NetApp Service Engine, and perform typical tasks. NetApp Service Engine is a self-service portal to provision, orchestrate, and manage the subscription, as well as provide detailed capacity usage reports. NetApp Service Engine enables you to provision NFS, CIFS, FC, iSCSI, and Amazon S3 buckets through the same interface. (In the live demo environment, only NFS provisioning is possible.)

The lab delivers the same cloud like experience you get with Flex Subscription.

Supported tasks in the live demo include: