NetApp and VMware Strengthen Partnership

NetApp, Inc. and VMware, Inc. announced the expansion of their longstanding global alliance.

Through innovative solutions and go-to-market initiatives, the 2 companies are helping customers reduce the cost, complexity and risk of migrating and modernizing enterprise workloads in multi-cloud environments. In addition, organizations can accelerate the performance and delivery of both traditional and new modern applications, and simplify daily operations through new integrations between both firms’ data management infrastructure.

This partnership is built on the foundation of shared experience supporting 20,000 mutual customers over more than 20 years. NetApp is a consistent VMware strategic design partner for current and future VMware cloud offerings including vSphere, VMware Cloud Foundation and several VMware Cross-Cloud services. The 2 firms are helping customers to manage, share and protect their hybrid and multi-cloud environments by collaborating on customer-driven co-engineering to offer solutions across a changing technology landscape.

“Customers today are faced with complex challenges to optimize their current IT investments while laying a path forward to modernize and accelerate their business,” said George Kurian, CEO, NetApp. “Together, NetApp and VMware have helped thousands of customers solve their multi-cloud challenges by effectively managing their enterprise workloads in any environment. By delivering powerful new solutions that help companies optimize their virtual data centers, modernize their applications, and provide cost-efficient, enterprise data management services to VMware Cloud, we can meet customers anywhere they are on their cloud journey.“

“At this stage it’s clear: Multi-cloud is the model we’re going to rely on for many years to come. It is the de facto operating model for the digital era, giving customers the freedom required to build, deploy, and manage applications in the way that best suits their business requirements,” said Raghu Raghuram, CEO, VMware. “Together, VMware and NetApp offer businesses the multi-cloud flexibility and choice they need to leverage the best innovations in any cloud environment.“

NetApp and VMware: Powering Multi-Cloud Era
The new wave of modern applications powering this digital age requires an innovative approach to enterprise workload and data management infrastructure. Organizations are turning to the public cloud to simplify and accelerate their business initiatives and require flexibility and choice across public cloud providers. These organizations also need new and integrated platforms that can manage both enterprise and modern applications while utilizing existing resources.

The renewed partnership addresses these challenges through focusing on 3 major customer-driven initiatives:

• Cost-Effective Migration to Multi-Cloud: The 2 companies are currently innovating together across the world’s 3 largest public cloud providers to certify and support VMware Cloud and NetApp Cloud Services. This helps customers running on VMware utilizing either NetApp or non-NetApp storage environments on-premises to migrate, extend or protect data-demanding enterprise workloads and files to the cloud with reduced cost and risk. Customers can right-size their cloud compute and storage architectures to reduce and control the costs of running data-demanding workloads in the cloud at scale, while also avoiding the costs of refactoring applications from on-premises into the cloud. The 2 partners have taken their decades of experience in managing enterprise workloads in the data center to deliver certified, integrated and supported solutions that bring these same benefits to customers leveraging the public cloud, all built on a trusted workload and data management foundation.
• Accelerate Modernized Applications Using Kubernetes/Containers: VMware Cloud Foundation with Tanzu allows IT to manage VMs and orchestrate containers from one unified platform. VMware Tanzu and VMware Cloud Foundation support the use of NetApp Ontap-based storage arrays, providing customers the ability to build out a flexible data fabric for traditional VMs and modern, containerized applications. For Kubernetes workloads, NetApp is a design partner with VMware Tanzu container-native storage integrating Astra Control with VMware Tanzu for vSphere Virtual Volumes (vVols) deployments. Customers can simplify and accelerate new modern application development and deployment alongside traditional virtualized workloads using enterprise-scale and protected solutions that are jointly validated and supported.
• Optimize The Data Center Through Modernized Infrastructure: Organizations require an efficient, cost-effective workload and data management platform to optimize existing resources. NetApp is a VMware co-design partner with vSphere and vVols for new and expanded support of key technologies from NetApp file and block storage platforms. This includes new certification and support to enable the use of vVols with NVMe-oF to allow enhanced block storage flash performance and more granular VM storage management over multiple types of network transports from FC, Ethernet, and standard TCP/IP networks. This also includes new integration to enhance the availability and security of running virtualized workloads across NFS 4.1 environments. Customers can unlock more performance for traditional virtualized workloads leveraging existing infrastructure investments while simplifying daily IT operations through jointly validated and supported solutions.

“According to IDC’s 2021 Multicloud Survey, 8 in 10 organizations are operating in multicloud environments, but most of them cite challenges such as lack of integration, management complexities, lack of end-to-end visibility, limited skills, and spiraling costs of operations,” said Archana Venkatraman, research director, cloud data management and CloudOps, IDC. “Together, VMware and NetApp are addressing these challenges head on to help customers make the most of their existing investment while providing a simplified path to move workloads to the cloud as their business requires.”

“SAP solutions power many of the world’s leading businesses today, including over 90% of the Global Fortune 2000,” says Ozren Kopajtic, VP, global cloud services, SAP. “NetApp and VMware deliver the scalable, high-performance foundation of SAP’s global public cloud platform, supporting nearly 30PB of information across tens of thousands of virtual volumes and VMs, and running one of the largest global deployments of VMware and NetApp technologies.”

“Be The Match helps thousands of people fighting blood cancers or blood diseases receive a potentially life-saving transplant each year by matching patients to donors through our national registry,” said Rob Hanson, VP, technology officer, Be The Match (The National Marrow Donor Program). “Our partnerships with NetApp and VMware allow us to efficiently manage 20 million records, benefiting from their commitments to continuous security and product innovation – key principles important to our mission. By reducing the risks of data loss while improving the productivity of our database and storage administration teams, they’re helping us bring together data from physicians, providers, donors, and researchers to have an invaluable impact on our patients.”