Washington – NetApp has introduced a private storage system for Microsoft Azure at the Worldwide Partner Conference.
Previously NetApp only made this solution for creating hybrid cloud environments available for Amazon Web Services.
Jon Kissane, the CSO of NetApp, told CDN that Microsoft’s cloud strategy articulated to the company that the software maker was committed to the enterprise space and cloud.
“They also have an open approach for customer and it matches with NetApp as we too are an enterprise and cloud focused vendor that wants to enable customers to have choice,” Kissane said.
The new NetApp Private Storage (NPS) for Azure leverages Microsoft’s ExpressRoute to establish a dedicated connection between a private storage environment hosted at Equinix co-location centres and the Azure public cloud. The ExpressRoute connection is also secure, high speed and with low latency.
Kissane added that this partnership enables the channel to build a cost-saving and agile infrastructure that can bridge on-premise and cloud resources.
There are three key areas that made this partnership align well to both vendors. They are:
- The FlexPod converged offering is repeatable for building private clouds;
- Microsoft’s commitment to the hybrid cloud; and
- An offering that moves data within the enterprise to other service providers and Azure.
For the channel, Kissane said that cloud-based partners can make money with private, hybrid, while finding ways to solve customer problems that is beneficial to all involved.
Another factor for the decision to partner with Microsoft is that its NetApp’s belief on-premise data centres are not going away and are basically private clouds. The value of the data and the partner’s control in that process of that for providing reliable access to the data will be key.
“There are people today who are making good money on this private cloud environment,” Kissane said.
He added that cloud is the biggest opportunity along with being the biggest challenge. “It’s clear that they are embracing hybrid cloud and it will be a matter of rate and pace.”
Kissane said that NetApp does not disclose margin for channel partners.
NPS for Azure will be capable for enterprise level workloads from SQL Server along with Oracle and SAP. It will provide single or multi-region disaster recovery in test mode for any failover scenarios.
Channel partners will have the ability to manage these workloads for customers no matter if they are peak or seasonal workloads along with any un-forecasted scenarios. It can also meet compliance requirements with SnapLock data function and data encryption.