Data Fabric? What is it? Why is it relevant?

What is NetApp’s strategy? What in my opinion makes NetApp's 'Tin' better than everyone else? The answer is simple. Our vision. I will come back to our vision shortly and do the ‘elevator pitch’ but before I do that I am going to say something controversial. The days of being a pure-play storage vendor are dead. You are probably thinking are NetApp not the World’s largest pure play Storage vendor? Technically that’s correct - After the Dell EMC merger, NetApp are the world’s largest storage vendor. However, in today’s changing market AWS and Azure have revolutionized how customers consume and store data. That means customers need the choice of retaining data on premise but also the flexibility and agility to leverage the Opex scale of cloud. This may be easy to describe and probably sounds like marketing waffle but for the modern data center what does that actually mean? Move data from on-premise storage to cloud storage and back again? How would that work without breaking the bank? Good question – and that’s where I feel NetApp’s vision is the key differentiation. NetApp have never been a storage vendor – I describe NetApp as a software company that designs Data Management operating systems that happen to sit on Tin. A Software-defined storage vendor is the marketing term I think. To simplify that further what that means is a customer can consume our platform on a NetApp storage device, their own storage device or download our operating system in the AWS and Azure cloud market place. That means using the ONTAP operating system wherever you want your data to sit. It also means you have access to the enterprise feature set without compromising cost. Further to that, you have real flexibility to where your data is stored. 

So what is NetApp’s vision then? Why is that relevant in today's evolving market? OK Time for the Elevator pitch.

NetApp's vision for data management is a data fabric that seamlessly connects different clouds, whether they are private, public, or hybrid environments (By Cloud we mean where you choose to store your data). A data fabric unifies data management across distributed resources to allow consistency and control of data mobility, security, visibility, protection, and access regardless of where your data is stored. Make sense?

The data fabric is relevant to all these environments because we can enable the same controls regardless of where your data sits in these environments. This for the customer means greater security, greater visibility, better mobility and most importantly greater control.

The diagram above is a good example of data Fabric in action. It shows how Private, Hybrid and Public clouds seamlessly work together. Lets use AWS as an example – its very easy to deploy a full stack in minutes. However, the challenge from a cost perspective appears when your application is data intensive. How do extend the enterprise feature set you may use on-premise to a public cloud environment. How do you enable features like compression and deduplication? This is where Cloud ONTAP can help. Cloud ONTAP is a virtual version of NetApp's leading storage operating system, Data ONTAP. It is designed to run within Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances. Once Cloud ONTAP is installed, Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volumes are assigned to the Cloud ONTAP EC2 compute instance to create the equivalent of a Data ONTAP storage array that operates within the AWS cloud. This will then enable you to reduce your cloud storage footprint as you can apply features like deduplication and compression in your cloud environment. Randstad, a leading recruitment agency were globally looking to overhaul their legacy storage environment. Their global CIO had set a directive that within 5 years IT services must be delivered from AWS. Randstad UK began looking around for a storage platform to replace its legacy storage. It requested demos from many of the major providers, including NetApp, Dell, HP, EMC, and Pure Storage. The potential providers where whittled down to NetApp and Pure Storage. Pure Storage installed a proof of concept on site, and the technology impressed Randstad. However, NetApp evaluation units consisting of All Flash FAS8040 and Cloud ONTAP ultimately won the day. By leveraging Cloud ONTAP Randstad had a clear pathway to the cloud without compromising core applications. Cloud ONTAP provided storage management from Randstad’s on-premises data centre to the cloud. It offered multiple performance and capacity options from small-capacity, lower performance applications to medium-scale workloads to higher performance demands, enabling the company to easily and efficiently develop a disaster recovery platform in the AWS cloud.   

Randstand are a good example of how enterprises are using our software to act as a bridge between on-premise infrastructure and a cloud-based model. Nevertheless, a growing band of customers I speak to want to move away from traditional Capex based IT to a self-service Opex model. They want the cloud consumption model but want to retain ownership and control of their data. In the NetApp world, we solve this problem by extending out our data fabric in a AWS or Azure Datacentre. 

Darz, a German IT Service provider are using Data Fabric in a Hybrid capacity to help their customers reduce cost and increase control and security. In 2015 they wanted to change the way their business consumed data. They wanted the flexibility and agility of cloud but were very nervous about storing their mission critical data on infrastructure they do not own. They approached Netapp to see if we could help. The solution? Netapp Private Storage. NPS is a physical storage device that sits in the same DC as AWS or Azure but you the customer own the physical asset. You then have a direct connect into AWS or Azure. With NPS DARZ were able to combine services from AWS and SoftLayer to optimize cost and performance for individual workloads. Because data lived locally in DARZ’s high-security data center they could switch workloads between cloud providers in seconds without having to migrate data. This also alleviated there data retention concerns but gave them the agility and flexibility to use cloud compute as and when its needed. Longer term Darz are seeing a significant reduction in their cloud bill as they can pick and choose what workload they pushed into a cloud environment.

In summary, Data Fabric is relevant to any business because it gives the customer greater control on how they consume their data. It gives you the flexibility to make use of public cloud but also use the same services with on-premise or in a hybrid environment. The multi-cloud capabilities of the Data Fabric provide organisations with a choice of environments for running their applications. This flexibility enables a wider range of services to choose from to meet application needs and business requirements. Assets can be protected and access maintained in the event a particular cloud is compromised. Cloud vendor lock-in can be avoided. All of this can be done while managing data in a secure way regardless of geographical location. This in my opinion are some of the key reasons why more and more customers are buying into our vision of the modern data center. Flexibility, security and control need to be the cornerstones of any IT strategy moving forward.

(All views are my own and based on my experiences. I am not claiming to be an expert - just sharing my humble experiences based on what I am seeing in the field.)