NetApp made a flurry of announcements on Wednesday at Insight extending their data fabric, with special relevance to developers and architects, emphasizing their cloud-first focus, and articulating their hybrid and multi-cloud proposition.
NetApp is touting the new Azure NetApp Files as a huge extension of their Microsoft relationship, which gives them a level of integration with their Azure cloud that Microsoft has not done before with anyone. Other announcements include the General Availability of NetApp Cloud Insights, NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP, and new ONTAP support for NetApp HCI.
NetApp’s cloud business is still fairly small, but their offerings will roll out in force this year, and NetApp wants customers to lead with them – a strategic decision that would have seemed bizarre not long ago, but is now central to the new NetApp.
All-flash led NetApp’s climb back from the brink to profitability, and all-flash remains one of NetApp’s strategic priorities this year. However, while Joel Reich’s business unit delivers most NetApp revenue, its development priorities have transitioned to the new Cloud First approach
NetApp becomes the first vendor to actually ship a NVMe fabric solution, with the AFF A800.
The deal is aimed at strengthening Veeam in the enterprise, and NetApp in the midmarket and SMB, and follows up several other recent Veeam resale partnerships.
NetApp has announced upgrades to key software products that make up their Data Fabric, including ONTAP 9.3.
Komprise adds full lifecycle management abilities, as well as the ability to confine defined data to make it invisible without deleting it, and the ability to build custom queries.
NetApp indicated no plans to extend this service capability to AWS, although from a functionality purpose it is the logical extension of this deal.
Elio is a chatbot that provides first level technical support using IBM Watson technology. NetApp has also enhanced their ActiveIQ cloud-based analytics.
NetApp announces a series of new and enhanced data services, as well as a refresh of several solutions aimed at the hybrid cloud.
Twelve years ago, NetApp acquired scale-out NAS startup Spinnaker, and began a long and horrific series of integration problems. This year, they acquired SolidFire’s scale-out technology, and took steps to learn from the lessons of the past.
Over the last year, NetApp has reshaped its channel strategy extensively, and will soon cap it with a new Hard Deck policy. Unlike a similar named policy of an old competitor, NetApp thinks this one will be highly popular with partners.
Mark Bregman, NetApp’s CTO, sits down for a detailed talk about NetApp’s technology strategy going forward, and why the company is convinced it has made the difficult transition from a vendor of yesterday to a vendor of tomorrow.
The new software adds software based encryption, container support and major performance and latency increases that NetApp says will continue their momentum in flash and hybrid.
