NetApp, a global, cloud-led, data-centric software business, and VMware announced the expansion of the companies’ longstanding global alliance. The NetApp and VMware partnership is built based on shared experience sustaining 20,000 mutual customers over more than 20 years. NetApp is a consistent VMware strategic design partner for current and future VMware Cloud offerings, including VMware vSphere, VMware Cloud Foundation, and several VMware Cross-Cloud services. NetApp and VMware are helping customers to effectively manage, share and protect their hybrid and multi-cloud environments by collaborating on customer-driven co-engineering to offer innovative solutions across an ever-changing technology landscape.
“Customers today are faced with complex challenges to optimize their current IT investments while laying a path forward to modernize and accelerate their business,” said George Kurian, Chief Executive Officer of NetApp. “Together, NetApp and VMware have helped thousands of customers solve their multi-cloud challenges by effectively managing their enterprise workloads in any environment. By delivering powerful new solutions that help companies optimize their virtual data centers, modernize their applications, and provide cost-efficient, enterprise-class data management services to VMware Cloud, we can meet customers anywhere they are on their cloud journey.”
“At this stage it’s clear: Multi-cloud is the model we’re going to rely on for many years to come. It is the de facto operating model for the digital era, giving customers the freedom required to build, deploy, and manage applications in the way that best suits their business requirements,” said Raghu Raghuram, Chief Executive Officer, VMware. “Together, VMware and NetApp offer businesses the multi-cloud flexibility and choice they need to leverage the best innovations in any cloud environment.”
The renewed partnership between NetApp and VMware addresses these challenges by focusing on three major customer-driven initiatives:
- Cost-Effective & Seamless Migration to Multi-Cloud – NetApp and VMware are currently innovating across the world’s three largest public cloud providers to certify and support VMware Cloud and NetApp Cloud Services. This helps customers running on VMware utilizing NetApp or non-NetApp storage environments on-premises to seamlessly migrate, extend or protect data-demanding enterprise workloads and files to the cloud with reduced cost and risk.
- Accelerate Modernized Applications Using Kubernetes/Containers – VMware Cloud Foundation with Tanzu allows IT to manage virtual machines and orchestrate containers from one unified platform. VMware Tanzu and VMware Cloud Foundation support NetApp ONTAP-based storage arrays, allowing customers to seamlessly build a flexible data fabric for traditional VMs and modern, containerized applications. For Kubernetes workloads, NetApp is a design partner with VMware Tanzu container-native storage integrating Astra Control with VMware Tanzu for VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes (vVols) deployments. Customers can now simplify and accelerate new modern application development and deployment alongside traditional virtualized workloads using enterprise-scale, high-performance and protected solutions that are jointly validated and supported.
- Optimize The Data Center Through Modernized Infrastructure – Organizations today require an efficient, cost-effective workload and data management platform to optimize existing resources. NetApp is a VMware co-design partner with vSphere and vVols for new and expanded support of key technologies from NetApp file and block storage platforms. This includes new certification and support to use vVols with NVMe-oF to allow enhanced block storage flash performance and more granular VM storage management over multiple types of network transport from FC, ethernet, and standard TCP/IP networks. This also includes new integration to enhance the availability and security of running virtualized workloads across NFS 4.1 environments. Customers can now unlock more performance for traditional virtualized workloads leveraging existing infrastructure investments while simplifying daily IT operations through jointly validated and supported solutions.
