NetApp: Hybrid Multi-Cloud Services

Founder of and Principal Analyst for Small World Big Data, Mike Matchett, spoke with NetApp’s Ingo Fuchs, Chief Technologist of Cloud & DevOps at NetApp, about NetApp’s new virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution for VMware, and how NetApp is bringing hybrid multi-cloud services and solutions to help customers manage these complex environments. (They aren’t just storage anymore!)

 

“VMware is On the Same Path as NetApp”

 

NetApp’s Chief Technologist, Cloud and DevOps, Ingo Fuchs, says that the company has made a significant investment in native cloud services “across all the major clouds, in DevOps technologies, automation, and containers” over the past few years. And people are asking about hybrid multi-cloud, containers, and the ability to run workloads anywhere, while maintaining compliance and keeping costs low.

 

NetApp VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure)

 

But people have also been talking about accelerating VDI and running 3D workloads on VDI HCI infrastructure. People want to work around the world. In response, Fuchs says, NetApp offers  NetApp Kubernetes service. “We orchestrated Kubernetes clusters across everything in the public cloud, but also on-premises, both NetApp HCI, but also anything that's VMware. So wherever you're running VMware, you can use NetApp Kubernetes service to orchestrate your containers. And we're not forcing you down a certain distribution path or anything like that. We're completely open. So this way you use Network Kubernetes Service across all of the native distributions in the public cloud and on-premises.”

 

NetApp Isn’t Just Storage

 

NetApp has expanded into the cloud, and Mike Matchett says that they seem to be keeping it a secret. Fuchs says that NetApp Kubernetes service has been available for over a year. In addition, “We have rolled out over a dozen native cloud services just over the last year and a half … Our integration with tools like Ansible and TerraForm, et cetera, on the automation side, all of that is shipping. Customers have been using that for years.”

 

Fuchs continues, “ … under George Kurian's leadership, we have transformed NetApp to a cloud-first company. We're building new products for the cloud first. And what that does is really makes you build different products and different services that are easy to consume, easy to use, easy to manage. And then we're bringing these cloud services on premises to design those products differently.”

 

Find Out More

 

To learn more, check out the full interview w. Ingo here: NetApp VMworld 2019