NetApp has renewed its partnership with Microsoft. In doing so, it says it wants to empower customers more in making cloud adoption a success. Extensions to the portfolio include new capabilities of Azure NetApp Files (ANF), BlueXP and Cloud Volumes ONTAP.
ANF is a storage solution that supports all enterprise-focused file workloads for the public cloud, bringing the performance and data management capabilities of on-prem to this environment as well. NetApp highlights the low latency it manages to achieve, even within the “fully-secure” Azure Virtual Network. It’s a promise it previously made during NetApp Insight 2023, where at the time we focused on its partnership with Google, among other things.
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ANF allows enterprise customers to extend security architectures from on-prem to the cloud, with flexible costs based on the performance and capacity required.
Robust
“Through our collaboration with Microsoft, we can deliver market-leading cloud storage and cloud infrastructure operations to our customers and partners that nobody else in the industry offers,” said Ronen Schwartz, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Cloud Storage, NetApp. “NetApp is offering a robust set of capabilities–with ANF, NetApp BlueXP Hybrid data services, Cloud Volumes ONTAP, and Spot. We innovate in collaboration with Microsoft Azure, offering customers unparalleled optimization to both storage and compute. We accelerate the move of the cloud of general file and enterprise workloads, and increasingly help customers with cloud native workloads, Kubernetes and AI.”
The new innovations in partnership with Microsoft that NetApp has already listed are:
- Azure NetApp Files datastores for Azure VMware Solution
- Application volume group for SAP HANA
- Smaller 2TiB capacity pool sizes
- Large volumes (up to 500 TiB)
- Customer managed keys
- Placement of volume in availability zones and replication between zones
New regions: South Africa North, Sweden Central, Qatar (Central), South Korea
In other words, broader support and more options for the user in terms of capacity and security. Incidentally, the aforementioned “Bring your own keys” initiative was available in Public Preview form back in February.
Spot by NetApp
In addition to the previously highlighted collaborations, NetApp also offers what it calls Spot by NetApp for Azure users, which reduces the cost of cloud usage with analytics through automation. “The ability to deploy and operate applications with speed and reliability is critical for companies to succeed in the cloud,” said Haiyan Song, Executive Vice President and General Manager of CloudOps at NetApp. “Our expanded Spot by NetApp portfolio on Microsoft Azure and partnership with Microsoft provides customers with what they need to continuously automate and optimize application infrastructure in the cloud and drive the cloud operation and cost efficiency their businesses demand while delivering the digital experience customers expect.”
Specifically, NetApp names five innovations that have recently appeared:
- Spot Eco support for Azure Savings Plans and all Azure accounts, including Pay-as-You-Go, multi-currency account (MCA), enterprise agreement (EA) and cloud solution provider (CSP).
- Spot Elastigroup Stateful Node for Azure.
- Spot Security support for Azure
- Spot Ocean for AKS Enterprise-grade serverless engine for Azure
- Spot Ocean for Apache Spark Azure support
- Instaclustr managed PostgreSQL on Azure NetApp Files
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