In the most far-reaching innovation announcement in its 25-year history, NetApp has introduced new hybrid cloud offerings that give customers unprecedented ability to use data for competitive advantage.
The announcements expand the company’s Data Fabric solutions and services portfolio to include the industry’s first enterprise-scale hyper converged solution (HCI), new consumption purchase models, improved all-flash capabilities, and hybrid cloud offerings that simplify moving data to and from the public cloud.
With digital transformation at the top of their agendas, global business leaders need new ways to harness their most valuable asset — their data. Time, skill, and budget gaps pose traditional challenges, but organizations must also contend with exploding volumes of data that are much more distributed, dynamic, and diverse.
NetApp’s hybrid cloud innovations allow customers to break down barriers to transformation by helping them to unify data across the widest range of cloud and on-premises environments. When data is at the heart of transformation, organizations are empowered to create more customer touchpoints, foster greater innovation, and optimize operations.
“Organisations that understand how to derive the full value from their data will see their digital transformations drive greater competitive advantage in the shortest amount of time,” says Simon Robinson, research vice-president at 451 Research. “To succeed, customers need to change their mindsets on data management, to liberate themselves from data siloes and seek approaches that unite data no matter where it resides.
“NetApp’s expanded portfolio, with its new HCI, hybrid cloud, and consumption model solutions, provides the means to maximize the impact of data, no matter where it lives, and create new value across the organisation.”
George Kurian, CEO of NetApp, comments: “The organizations that are defining the future recognize that unleashing the full potential of their data is essential for effective digital transformation and long-term competitive advantage.
“NetApp is uniquely capable of helping customers to unify their data to achieve success in the digital era. Today’s announcements of enterprise-scale HCI and new hybrid cloud software and services extend our Data Fabric architecture and leadership in providing hybrid cloud data services that simplify management of applications and data across clouds and on-premises environments.”
Next-generation data centre solutions simplify, accelerate, and scale application deployment:
* NetApp HCI delivers world’s first enterprise-scale hyper converged solution – Customers can break free from the limits of first-generation HCI with NetApp HCI. This solution delivers on the full promise of HCI, allowing customers to run multiple applications with guaranteed performance and benefit from unmatched flexibility, scale, automation, and integration with the Data Fabric. Built on SolidFire(r) innovation, NetApp HCI gives enterprises, mid-sized businesses, and service providers the confidence to easily consolidate all workloads, scale in ways that won’t strand resources, and deliver the performance required by next-generation applications. With NetApp HCI, organizations can unleash the complete power of their infrastructure with the ability to simplify management and independently scale compute and storage resources. NetApp HCI features integrations with partner solutions including those from Commvault, Intel, MongoDB Enterprise, Veeam, and VMware.
* ONTAP Select software-defined storage (SDS) optimized for new use cases – New features have been added to NetApp ONTAP Select, SDS software which delivers the value of NetApp’s proven data management platform on commodity servers. A new remote office/branch office solution addresses the space and cost constraints of remote offices and ruggedized deployments with a 2-node, high availability configuration and broader support for VMware vSphere licenses. Additionally, customers can deploy enterprise NAS services in more diverse storage environments, including VMware vSAN, with external storage arrays, and when deploying the new NetApp HCI offering. ONTAP Select is also available on IBM Bluemix infrastructure as a service for an in-cloud offering. Customers can try ONTAP Select via a 90-day evaluation.
Hybrid Cloud Solutions offer freedom of choice in how to deploy IT resources:
* NetApp OnDemand consumption model brings cloud-like flexibility to on-premises environments – This new technology service delivery model simplifies purchase and management of data storage capacity. It marries NetApp on-premises infrastructure with the flexibility of a usage-based consumption model and the economic agility benefits of public cloud, with customers paying monthly for capacity consumed. The infrastructure is NetApp owned, customer managed, providing organizations with control and governance of their data management environment. When bundled with NetApp managed services, NetApp or NetApp partners can provide a complete data management as a service experience.
* OnCommand Insight (OCI) adds new functions to ease hybrid cloud migration – OCI is pioneering software that provides hybrid IT infrastructure monitoring and analytics across the Data Fabric. It offers a single means for organizations that are embracing the cloud to manage and improve their multi-vendor hybrid infrastructure. OCI enables faster troubleshooting as well as optimization of resource usage, cost awareness, and capacity and performance forecasting. Customers can plan for migrations to the cloud by understanding the resources that applications are consuming on-premises, and can then monitor performance and capacity data of those applications once they are living in the cloud.
Data centre modernisation solutions improve performance and efficiencies:
* New NetApp ONTAP software boosts all-flash performance, efficiency, cloud data movement to modernize operations. The industry’s leading data management software now brings new levels of performance, efficiency, and cloud capabilities to NetApp All Flash FAS (AFF) arrays, the world’s fastest and most cloud-connected all-flash arrays. The availability of the FabricPool feature, demonstrated at Insight 2016, delivers automatic and transparent tiering of inactive data to the cloud, further optimizing on-premises flash and reducing overall storage costs by up to 40%. Expanded inline deduplication across multiple pools of storage increases storage efficiency by as much as 30%, building on NetApp’s leading data reduction technologies. New performance controls, including Quality of Service minimum and intelligent data placement, provide consistent performance for business-critical applications.
* NextCredit Program offers best future-proof assurance program in the industry. With NextCredit, NetApp introduces the industry’s most flexible future credit program. Customers who purchase eligible AFF A Series models and associated support contracts, upon exercising the renewal terms, will receive a flexible, fixed dollar credit toward future purchase of NetApp products. These credits let customers upgrade or build out their Data Fabric with new technologies and capabilities, including cloud and SaaS-based solutions, as they become available. It can be used in multiple ways, from AFF controller upgrades, to new nodes in a Data Fabric cluster, to licenses for ONTAP Cloud so customers can easily connect with public cloud resources.
NetApp HCI is the first enterprise-scale hyper converged infrastructure solution to provide compute, storage and networking in agile, scalable, easy to manage 4-node building blocks. It is designed on the foundation of SolidFire all-flash storage to deliver guaranteed performance, automation, and mature integrated efficiency, replication, data protection, and high availability services.
Customers can confidently deploy NetApp HCI from the edge to the core of the data center. They can expect to be up and running in less than 30 minutes and to have more than 90% of their traditional performance-related problems be eliminated. The VMware vCenter plug-in provides full control of the entire infrastructure through an intuitive user interface.
