Ignite is Microsoft’s biggest show of the year and it is going on right now. Ignite attracts IT professionals who are looking for the latest insights and trends to support their digital transformation initiatives. This year I think the biggest story is that NetApp and Microsoft are expanding their partnership to enable unified data storage on premises and in the cloud.
Unified data storage is more than just combined file, block, and object protocols. Imagine a truly unified operating environment for any data type (structured or unstructured), workload, or application, on premises or in the cloud. And imagine it served by the same storage operating system wherever you need it, on premises with cutting-edge flash storage and in the Azure public cloud. Imagine storage that provides intelligent data services running in Azure. Only NetApp in partnership with Microsoft delivers true unified data storage in Azure.
Digital transformation and the need for intelligent data
It’s no secret. Your organization is struggling to build an Azure-based infrastructure that can handle the needs of your growing hybrid and cloud-native workloads. Your applications require a data platform that offers enterprise-scale performance and manageability, while also providing compliance, security, and accessibility. And let’s not forget the balancing act of shrinking your carbon footprint without shrinking your IT capabilities. It couldn’t be more obvious. You need a complete enterprise-grade cloud data solution in Azure.
Saying “let’s just migrate to Azure” won’t solve every challenge. That’s why Microsoft and NetApp partnered to deliver industry-leading cloud data services. Now even your most demanding workloads—SAP, VMware, HPC, Oracle, SQL Server, Azure Virtual Desktop—can run on Azure as fast as on premises, powered by NetApp. From migrating complex databases to driving environmentally sustainable innovation to enhancing cyber resilience, NetApp® BlueXP™ technologies deliver on the promise of Azure with a unified SaaS control plane for data and service management and complete APIs to accelerate automation at scale.
NetApp and Azure: We’re always innovating
NetApp and Microsoft continue to deliver ever-greater innovation to our customers through our long-standing partnership. Together, we give customers an efficient way to optimize their Azure infrastructure, with Azure first-party storage service based on NetApp ONTAP® data management software and NetApp marketplace data services, helping customers to realize maximum benefit from their cloud investment. These benefits include solutions to provide integrated support for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) environments and reliable and cost-effective backup and restore capabilities to seamlessly protect and archive both Cloud Volumes ONTAP data in Azure and ONTAP data on premises. Simple to activate, to automate, and to scale, the Cloud Backup service works with unstructured data, Oracle and SQL databases, and virtual machines.
Azure NetApp Files Datastores for Azure VMware Solution (AVS) is also available to help you match your storage to your needs, while significantly reducing costs. How? By enabling you to create NFS datastores by using Azure VMware APIs to mount those datastores directly to the AVS cluster. Your costs will be dramatically reduced because you will require fewer AVS nodes for your storage-intensive workloads.
What’s new with Azure NetApp Files
The latest Azure NetApp Files releases include:
- Bringing Enterprise Security Architecture to US Government public cloud.
- Standard networking supported in Azure for US Government regions. Customer-managed key support that enables US government customers to bring their on-premises security architecture to Azure.
- Reduced total cost of ownership.
- Cool access (tiering) enables customers to manage large files content repositories in the most cost-effective way possible in Azure. Reduces overall TCO by 30+%.
- 2TiB-capacity pools enable K8s workloads, independent software vendors, and in general reduces the entry cost for small deployments and customers’ proof of concept tests.
- Enabling migration of large-scale HPC and EDA workloads.
- 2x improvement in performance with Azure NetApp Files Large Volumes (500TiB).
- Cost-effective scaling through smaller starting size, 2TiB capacity pools.
- Azure NetApp Files now supports Azure VMware Solution in US Gov regions.
- Azure NetApp Files datastores for Azure VMware Solution provide the ability to scale storage independently of compute and can go beyond the limits of the local instance storage provided by vSAN reducing total cost of ownership.
- New regions: South Africa North, Sweden Central, Qatar (Central), Korea South.
NetApp and Microsoft continue to innovate new solutions to help customers like you maximize performance and efficiency while optimizing cost. In addition to the above capabilities, we are committed to delivering the industry’s most comprehensive data management service in Azure powered by NetApp.
We invite you to try out Azure NetApp Files and the other NetApp BlueXP cloud data services and experience the many benefits our customers have already experienced. Learn more by going to our webpage and achieve more tomorrow!
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