You don’t get a diverse group of IT analysts to agree on much these days…but virtually all of the dozens of analysts that I have spoken with in the last month agree that the de facto enterprise IT operating environment today is a hybrid cloud landscape – and will be for the foreseeable future. Customers have figured it out that the cloud is powerful, but not a panacea, and different environments have different strengths for different workloads. Security concerns are real and affect some workloads more than others; the laws of physics (i.e., latency) are still pretty inviolate and affect transactional some workloads more than others; and geographic dis-proximity (i.e., not being in the same place) is best practice for some workflows for good reason.
The key: figuring out which resource base (on premises or cloud) to use for which workload and when, in the most intelligent way.
In the storage world, which boils down to figuring out how to enable on-premises infrastructure to leverage aspects of the cloud in the fastest, safest, and smartest way. Or to use a common phrase – delivering hybrid cloud storage. Sounds pretty straightforward, and lots of companies make a claim to be hybrid cloud storage. But – is this in name only? There really doesn’t seem to be much ‘cloud’ in most of the ‘hybrid cloud’ storage offerings, which is leading to customers to ask some tough question around, “how much ‘cloud’ is there really in your hybrid cloud storage?”
At NetApp, literally billions of dollars of investment over the last few years have gone into making sure we’re not afraid of that kind of hard question. With a single storage operating system that can be used across on-premises or major cloud environments in the form of NetApp ONTAP, we give customers the same operating environment everywhere. That slashes complexity. Further, we’ve built-in certain storage and data services that customers need regardless of which storage vendor they work with – but would normally need to acquire third-party software and services to accomplish. That slashes complexity even further – and pulls savings into the mix.
Consider this as a tough question: does your storage back itself up to the cloud, with full 3-2-1 capability and without requiring any backup software, media servers, or agents? Ours does.
Or how about this one: does your storage let you avoid the issues that arise with capacity constraints by tiering old/unused data off to the cloud – automatically - without any change in applications or workflows? Ours does.
Here’s a timely one: while ransomware protection at the storage level is becoming ante to the game these days, insider threats remain just as real and often cost even more; does your storage protect against insider threats (users taking strange actions that maybe they shouldn’t) of the type that ransomware protection isn’t designed to stop? Ours does.
NetApp flash storage systems have designed-in capabilities to provide all these services, leveraging the world’s leading on-premises storage footprint with ubiquitous cloud technology to do all of these things. Back themselves up, free up capacity, detect insider threats – and more. Using the best of datacenter and cloud technologies. And did I mention that these are all enabled simply and easily via a SaaS-delivered control plane for all your systems, regardless of where they are (anywhere in the world, or in the cloud)?
Now that’s putting the ‘cloud’ in hybrid cloud.
It’s not just about technology, although that’s cool. Sometimes it’s about money, and how you fund the initiatives. Consider a scenario where – since we really did put ‘cloud’ in hybrid cloud – a customer’s datacenter workloads could tap into a ‘second budget’ that exists in most enterprises, but other storage vendors can’t access. This refers to the committed cloud spend agreements that most enterprises have with one or more hyperscaler; in exchange for a significant discount, they agree to spend millions of dollars over the coming 3-5 years. It’s often then a combined IT/FinOps exercise to ensure that they find ways to actually use that committed spend – or they pay money back to the hyperscalers. NetApp systems can tap into that spend to have capacity, data protection, or insider threat protection paid for out of that committed spend – not the datacenter budget. And it’s good for the business overall, providing the financial flexibility to maximize discounts today without worrying about penalties tomorrow.
There’s more, such as any-to-any data movement and migration, automatic data classification and instant compliance reports, or consolidation of dozens/hundreds of distributed Windows file servers into a single globally accessible instance. Come and take a look at bluexp.netapp.com – I think you’ll be impressed with how we really put the cloud in hybrid cloud.