NetApp Aims to Make the Hybrid Cloud Less Complex, More Secure
Offering a streamlined process for multi- and hybrid cloud management that includes storage and security capabilities represents one of the holy grails in today’s cloud native world. DevOps teams are thus looking for ways to at least simplify the management of hybrid multicloud infrastructure for deployments of distributed data and applications. And if a vendor can offer this as an on-demand SaaS, better yet.
NetApp says it offers all of this and more with new security, storage and other capabilities with additions to its hybrid cloud portfolio.
With the release, NetApp is aiming to help DevOps teams struggling with the adoption of hybrid multicloud infrastructure, Ronen Schwartz, senior vice president, cloud volumes service at NetApp, told The New Stack. As the new platform on which to develop their applications and power their digital transformation, hybrid multicloud, in general, can bring great business benefits.
However, the lack of interoperability and consistency between on-premises and multiple cloud resources can “cause major headaches that could slow adoption and limit flexibility, negating the benefits,” Schwartz said. “Different environments requiring different management tools, services, and workflows increase operational chaos. Customers can end up with their data locked into various differing silos across multiple clouds. This also expands the attack surface for all manner of security threats, most notably ransomware attacks.”
Simple and Better
With NetApp’s latest enhancements, the network services provider is delivering a simple and better hybrid multicloud storage and data management that helps customers buy, deploy, operate and optimize a unified cloud experience as a service, Schwartz said. “We’ve also embedded cyber-resilience and ransomware protection capabilities directly into our hybrid multicloud solutions,” Schwartz said.
Specially, the product and service updates include:
- A simplified hybrid multicloud experience available “as a service”
- Enhanced anti-ransomware integration to protect, detect, and recover if an attack occurs
- NetApp ONTAP: Better data security, ransomware protection, performance, and operational simplicity
- NetApp Cloud Manager: Full integration of the ONTAP System Manager and increased subscription management
- NetApp Keystone: Hybrid Cloud STaaS. Single subscription for on-premises and cloud storage services
- VMware: NetApp is the only partner chosen to become supported for use as an external supplemental datastore with VMware Cloud Services with your cloud of choice.
One of the main problems the releases solve is improving storage across hybrid multicloud environments as DevOps teams migrate VM workloads within hybrid multicloud environments with NetApp’s platform.
While it was previously possible to migrate VM workloads to VMware Cloud on public clouds, under the previous paradigm, customers either had to use the embedded storage in VMWare Cloud, Schwartz said.
“This limits flexibility and scalability with accompanying higher costs, or requires a more complicated procedure to access NetApp storage directly from each guest VM, Schwartz said. Now NetApp will be the only vendor able to offer scalable external supplemental datastores provided by shared storage as a single pool for all VMs rather than on a per-VM basis. This is more analogous to the common architecture used by best-of-breed on-prem VMware environments plus external unified storage.”
ONTAP Improvements
For better anti-ransomware integration, NetApp says its new ONTAP data management software features help to improve data security and ransomware protection while remaining simple to use under the umbrella of its release of new capabilities for its hybrid cloud portfolio. The improvement that ONTAP offers that NetApp communicated include:
- More safeguards by requiring multiple approvals for critical administrative tasks.
- Rapid detection of new threats with the aid of machine learning and “enhanced algorithms” that NetApp said can detect more sophisticated malware.
- The capability of securing multi-petabyte datasets.
