Thursday, March 28, 2024

NetApp: Cloud Portfolio Review

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Organizations adopt multicloud strategies for many different reasons. Many fear overdependence and need flexibility, or some chase best-in-class specialization. Regardless of the reason, financial considerations always play a strong role. Weighing these factors leads different managers to select different mixes of cloud vendors, edge architecture, or local data center resources.

Yet, each resource requires different processes for deployment, configuration, billing, security, and more. Managers can simplify these processes by adopting solutions such as NetApp’s portfolio of cloud management products to build, run, manage, and secure apps across any cloud environment.

The NetApp Cloud Portfolio includes solutions such as Application Development Platform, Cloud Migration, Cloud Storage, Data Management & Protection, Platform as a Service (PaaS), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Virtualization.

See below to learn all about where NetApp stands in the cloud market:

NetApp cloud portfolio and the multicloud management market

The global multicloud management market has been estimated by Verified Market Research to be as low as $2.25 billion in 2020 but growing at a CAGR of 30.8% from 2021–2028. Grand View Research estimates a higher $5.09 billion in revenue for 2020, but a lower CAGR of 26.3%.

NetApp launched their ONTAP Software and Hybrid Cloud Portfolio in June 2021, and it recognized net revenues of $5.7 billion in 2021 but did not specifically note multicloud management revenue.

Competitors in the market include:

  • BMC Software
  • CenturyLink
  • Cisco Systems
  • Citrix 
  • CloudBolt
  • Cloudmore
  • CoreStack
  • DoubleHorn
  • Flexera
  • IBM
  • Jamcracker 
  • Microsoft 
  • Oracle
  • RightScale
  • Turbonomic
  • VMware

NetApp cloud portfolio key features

The key features of the NetApp Cloud Portfolio consist of the key features of its component applications:

  • Application integration via Astra, Trident, and more enables users to utilize integrated software development and IT operations and Kubernetes lifecycle management as well as provision storage with Oracle, SAP HANA, Microsoft SQL Server, VMware vSphere, and more.
  • Cloud migration and storage through ONTAP and StorageGRID among others offers application back-end caching or storage scratch space, edge-to-core data ingestion, hybrid cloud architecture enablement, small-scale archival, and SaaS and self-service storage options.
  • Data management and protection via Cloud Insights, ONTAP, etc. provide automatic ransomware protection with preemptive detection and enhanced recovery, the ability to clone any database and take advantage of fully integrated cloud backup, cloud-based compliance, electronic design automation (EDA) and software distribution, high-performance storage area network (SAN) workloads, hybrid cloud network accessible storage (NAS) that can cache hot data across multiple cloud instances, object storage, the ability to prevent attacks and minimize data loss or downtime, and simplified storage management.
  • PaaS options through Spot, InstaClustr, and more offer optimized and secured databases, data pipelines, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) options, and workflow solutions for app developers.
  • Professional services to support design and building of hybrid clouds
  • Natural language processing (NLP); virtualization options via desktop-as-a-service; container virtualization and Kubernetes deployment; and virtual servers, Apache Spark as a service

NetApp cloud portfolio key benefits

An organization that adopts NetApp’s Cloud Portfolio tools seeks to gain the following key benefits from managing a multicloud environment:

Cloud options

Selecting a hybrid or multicloud environment avoids overdependence on a single cloud vendor, or vendor lock-in; reduces risk of a failure or downtime; and permits optimizing cloud architecture for performance or cost.

For example, NetApp’s ONTAP FabricPool can tier cloud-hosted data to segregate hot data from cold data and host them in more cost-effective and performance-optimized cloud resources.

Optimized security and performance

NetApp built its reputation by integrating deduplication and data compression as features instead of extra-fee services for early NetApp offerings. With the acquisition of InstaClustr, the NetApp Cloud Portfolio now offers a PaaS that will provide automated and optimized databases, pipelines, and workflow solutions, so applications developers can focus on their programming.

NetApp’s ONTAP software also increases storage efficiency by up to 33% and uses temperature-sensitive storage (cold, hot, etc.) efficiency to further optimize data storage to improve costs, data sizes, and application performance.

Multicloud deployment simplicity

NetApp’s tools such as Simplicity 365 provide quick setup, one-click firmware updates, easy performance tuning, automatic cluster updates, and deep file system analytics. Additionally, playbooks for common workflows can be enacted, so managers can simplify the overall IT environment and reduce hours wasted on routine activities and management.

NetApp estimates that it takes less than 10 minutes to build a hybrid cloud and set up cloud backups of both cloud-based and on-premises data. Further, NetApp Cloud Portfolio tools provide a common and integrated experience for all cloud environments as well as simplified and trackable end-user visibility into IT resource consumption.

NetApp cloud portfolio use cases

DreamWorks Animation

For modern animated films made with computer graphics, a single film may be composed of 500 million files that must remain uncorrupted and available to meet the release date.

DreamWorks Animation, the studio behind How to Train Your Dragon, Shrek, and Trolls needed a data storage solution that could provide continuous accessibility to the data for their animation teams without consuming too many IT engineering resources with data management.

“Because we use NetApp, our engineers are able to concentrate their efforts on the needs of our creative and production teams, instead of focusing all of their attention on data management,” said DreamWorks Technology Fellow and VP of Platform & Services Architecture Skottie Miller.

FICO

FICO maintains huge volumes of historical and real-time data to generate a credit risk score based upon the financial history of most Americans. This data needs to be reliably available to the financial institutions that depend upon it to make loans, but it also must be secured to protect the financial data for each person.

“It is really important to keep this data safe,” explained Greg Weld, the senior converged infrastructure engineer at FICO. “NetApp gives us all the controls to have many virtual local area networks (VLANs), storage encryption, everything that is necessary to keep data in a secure environment away from any nefarious source.”

SCHOTT Schweiz AG

SCHOTT Schweiz AG manufactures 50 billion borosilicate glass type 1 containers annually, the gold-standard material to package and transport drugs to make them safe and portable. The SCHOTT global supply chain for containers and other products generates huge data, but the constant operation cannot afford downtime or lost data.

“A 24/7 operation has no capacity reserve,” said Michael Schachinger, IT location manager at SCHOTT Schweiz AG. “NetApp solutions keep everything going and can recover data fast. That helps us meet delivery dates and strengthens the pharmaceutical supply chain.”

NetApp cloud portfolio differentiators

Organizations pursuing multicloud solutions will likely select the NetApp Cloud Portfolio because of their specific differentiators:

Brand reputation

GigaOm recently ranked NetApp No. 1 in Primary Storage for Large Enterprises, Enterprise Scale-out File Systems, and Cloud File Systems. Additionally, for nearly three decades, NetApp provided the primary storage platform for databases on-premises and continued their leadership to host data on Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud.

Continuous availability and business continuity

When uptime becomes a priority, NetApp’s SnapMirror® Business Continuity (SMBC) enables flexible, cost-effective, instant failover for a variety of critical business applications such as SAP, Oracle, and more. When used in combination with NetApp-enabled efficient multicloud storage, infrastructure, and applications, managers can achieve data and infrastructure reliability and uptime.

Security and data protection

NetApp deploys hardware and software encryption plus Transport Layer Security (TLS) to maintain end-to-end data encryption for blocks, files, and objects. This encryption extends throughout on-premises and cloud resources.

ONTAP can also detect, block, and help rapidly recover from ransomware attacks on-premises and in the cloud. Additionally, NetApp offers a Zero Trust security solution enabled by multi-factor authentication (MFA), role-based access controls (RBACs), and the ability to establish microcores and perimeters around an organization’s data.

NetApp cloud portfolio ratings

The various NetApp Cloud portfolio products will each have their own ratings. For the purposes of this review, we’ll use the NetApp ONTAP product as a representative example of the NetApp solution ratings:

Review site Rating
Gartner Peer Insights 4.5/5
TrustRadius 8.8/10
G2 4.4/5
Capterra 4/5
PeerSpot 4.4/5

NetApp cloud portfolio pricing

Pricing for the NetApp Cloud Portfolio products varies depending upon the subscription type, deployment, and environment for deployment. NetApp provides a free ONTAP trial limited to 500GB and 10 deployments and publishes direct pricing for:

  • Essentials License
    • Contains ONTAP, 24/7 enterprise support, cross-zone high availability, etc.
    • As low as $0.036 per GB per month for a contract for single-node deployment in a secondary environment
    • As high as $0.105 per GB per month for a consumption model for high-availability deployment in a primary environment
    • Extra fee for Cloud Data Sense, WORM, and Cloud Backup
  • Professional License
    • Adds unlimited backups with NetApp Cloud Backup to the features in the essentials license
    • As low as $0.108 per GB per month for a contract for single-node deployment in a secondary environment
    • As high as $0.132 per GB per month for a consumption model for high-availability deployment in a primary environment
    • Extra fee for Cloud Data Sense and WORM

NetApp’s Keystone tool helps companies predict, manage, and license NetApp Cloud Portfolio options. NetApp solutions can also be licensed through partners and cloud providers that set their own prices.

Conclusions

Modern enterprises need to consider multicloud environments to manage ever-increasing data and rising requirements for security and uptime. The decades of experience and rich features of NetApp’s Cloud Portfolio simplifies management of highly complex environments and offer the ability to meet or exceed needs for performance, efficiency, and security.

Managers shopping for a multicloud management solution need to make sure to include NetApp Cloud Portfolio products for evaluation.

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