In the most far-reaching innovation announcement in its 25-year history, NetApp today 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.

“Organizations 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,” said 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 organization.”

“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,” said George Kurian, NetApp chief executive officer. “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.”

“Datalink helps clients ensure their application workloads are aligned to the right platform to optimize business value. We have long partnered with NetApp due to our shared vision of data management as the foundation of on-premises, hybrid, and cloud platforms using NetApp’s Data Fabric,” said Chief Architect Jason Anderson, Datalink, an Insight company. “The SolidFire underpinning for NetApp HCI has proven itself in our lab testing and in numerous client deployments to have the stability, scale, performance, and guaranteed quality of service needed for a truly enterprise-grade HCI platform. We are excited by NetApp’s entry into the HCI market and look forward to leveraging NetApp HCI as a catalyst to transform and optimize IT to achieve intended business outcomes.”

ANNOUNCEMENT HIGHLIGHTS

·         Next-generation Data Center 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 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 Center Modernization 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.

Insights on NetApp HCI Enterprise-scale Solution

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.

NetApp HCI is planned to be generally available in the fourth quarter of 2017. The company has provided early access to the innovations of NetApp HCI to a number of technology partners that are integrating with the solution. Their perspectives include:

Commvault, Ralph Nimergood, vice president, Alliances and Channels: “We are delighted to share the same vision as NetApp in supporting our customers as they transform and deliver hybrid IT services to their business and customers through today’s unveiling of NetApp HCI. Integrating with NetApp HCI provides customers a clear path to accelerate deployment and realize the potential value stored in their most strategic asset — their data. We look forward to supporting NetApp HCI as it comes to market and through our Commvault Data Platform, giving customers peace of mind knowing their data is always protected, accessible, and ready to use, anywhere, anytime — in the cloud or on-premises.” 

Intel Corporation, Jennifer Huffstetler, senior director, Datacenter & Storage Products: “Intel and NetApp share a commitment to enterprise computing and a passion for helping customers identify and easily deploy the Intel Xeon processors and networking technologies that will best ensure customer success in the data-driven future. Our platform technology contributions to NetApp’s new enterprise-scale HCI will help give organizations a better way to guarantee quality of service. We expect NetApp HCI will create opportunities that customers never imagined, providing a path to scalable hybrid cloud deployments in their IT data center transformation journey.”

MongoDB, Alan Chhabra, vice president, Worldwide Partners: “MongoDB is the most popular modern database, used by innovators to build mission-critical applications and to power their giant ideas. NetApp HCI introduces the benefits of enterprise-scale hyper converged infrastructures and gives customers a new approach to consolidating traditional and next-generation apps. We are pleased to have MongoDB Enterprise be part of this new wave of innovation in data management.”

Veeam, Andy Vandeveld, vice president, Global Alliances: “Users, whether at home, work or school, want a seamless digital experience and anything less is unacceptable. Enterprises are having to re-think their IT strategies and service models, and Availability is of paramount importance. We welcome the opportunity to further our relationship with NetApp on the introduction of NetApp HCI. Our Availability capabilities, teamed with this new class of enterprise-scale HCI, targets the growing need to mitigate risk, save time, and dramatically reduce capital and operational costs, while always supporting customers’ current and future business goals.”

VMware, Mark Lohmeyer, vice president, Products, Cloud Platform Business Unit: “For 15 years, VMware and NetApp have partnered on new capabilities to modernize the data center and make it easier for enterprises to unleash the true power of their infrastructure. NetApp’s new HCI solution builds on this strong partnership, which has served mutual customers well, from evangelizing virtualization to navigating the path to the software-defined data center and the hybrid cloud. The NetApp solution will include VMware vSphere, enabling mutual customers to continue to take advantage of our proven collaboration.”