NetApp Simplifies and Speeds Digital Transformation for Customers Through Public Cloud Relationships

NetApp, Inc. announced continued growth and momentum helping organizations unlock the best of cloud at less cost, through its collaboration with the world’s 3 largest public clouds.

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The company’s expansion in the cloud has been driven by customers and supported by these partnerships, accelerating NetApp’s public cloud services’ customer and financial growth by bringing its CloudOps and ITOps solutions to existing and new addressable customers. Furthering its investment in the cloud, NetApp acquired Data Mechanics in early FY22, and this month announced the intent to acquire CloudCheckr to bolster the Spot by NetApp portfolio’s existing continuous cloud optimization capabilities.

This growth, driven by ONTAP data management software, which provides performance shared storage for file and block workloads, has propelled the native integration of the company’s cloud file services into each of the major public clouds.

“The three largest public clouds in the world are choosing NetApp, because customers are choosing ONTAP,” said Anthony Lye, EVP and GM, public cloud services. “Our strategy has positioned ONTAP as the native shared storage solution with rich data services inside the three public clouds. Now, our public cloud partners provide customers with the simplest path to the cloud and allow them to derive the most value from their data and applications.“

“The completeness of NetApp’s offering, combined with the ability to address a very broad set of storage use cases beyond cloud file storage, and the availability as a tier-1 offering both on AWS and Azure, makes it a compelling choice,” said Enrico Signoretti, senior storage analyst, GigaOm.⁽¹⁾

Microsoft Azure
The company has partnered with Microsoft Corp. for nearly 30 years. In 2021, Microsoft recognized NetApp as the global ‘Customer Experience Partner of the Year’, and the US SAP on Azure Partner of the Year. In the last 12 months, the firm has more than tripled the number of co-sells offered on the Azure Marketplace, making it easy for Azure customers to consume the company’s cloud services.

Since its general availability in 2019, Azure NetApp Files (ANF), a fully managed, first-party service sold, billed, and supported by Microsoft in 35+ regions globally and is the first and only shared file service certified for use with SAP HANA. Recent innovations with Azure include the general availability of Azure Cross Region Replication, public preview of Azure NetApp Files Backup to preserve storage efficiencies, and of Spot PC for secure, optimized Azure Virtual Desktop-based Cloud PC environments.

“Alongside NetApp, we have worked with ANF customers to successfully migrate and run some of their largest and most important ONTAP production workloads, enabling the most demanding applications with performance and scale that meets or beats what they get on-premises,” said Jurgen Willis, VP, product management, Azure Storage, Microsoft Corp.

“With ANF, we get scalability and flexibility, which is important for businesses to run and have a faster time-to-market for their products,” said Lalit Patel, CTO, enterprise cloud services, SAP. “We are able to deploy environments almost 30 to 40% faster and reduce the number of outages by 80% because of the stability that ANF provides.“

Google Cloud
The company and Google Cloud began collaborating in 2018, introduced Cloud Volumes Service (CVS) for Google Cloud in 2019, and launched Astra with support for Google Cloud in 2020. Earlier this month, it announced that it would serve as the primary data and storage vendor for its Google Distributed Cloud Hosted offering and introduced the integration of Google Cloud VMware Engine with NetApp Cloud Volumes Service support for VM datastores – a fully managed service that helps organizations meet their need for virtual workload storage and disaster recovery.

“Our partnership with NetApp continues to grow, rolling out new capabilities that will make it easier and more cost-effective to deliver enterprise workloads on Google Cloud and bringing customers even more flexibility across hybrid and cloud deployments,” said Bronwyn Hastings, VP, global technology partnerships, Google Cloud.

“With NetApp’s deep integrations with Google Cloud, we’re reaping all of the benefits of the cloud as a service, with configurations preset, elasticity built-in and DR capabilities in place within five minutes,” said Tom Gentry, technologist, Gunpowder. “By making the technology challenges disappear for these studios, we’re able to deliver the high performance our customers need anywhere in the world.“

Google Spot VMs screenshot
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Additionally, Spot by NetApp and Google Cloud have partnered to help companies take advantage of the recently announced Google Spot VMs. With this, Google Cloud customers can continuously optimize performance, availability and cost with Spot by NetApp for cloud cost savings without the risk of service interruption.

Resources:
Blog post: Ungated Innovation: Azure NetApp Files
Blog post: NetApp INSIGHT ‘21 – Google Cloud Momentum

(1) Source: GigaOm, Radar for Cloud File Systems, September 22, 2021 (for subscribers only)