A bit of a Star Trek misquote I know, but I’m pretty sure Captain Picard would have said that as the ships IT department looked to enable their hybrid cloud strategy. For many of us, hybrid cloud is the reality of our future IT designs, the flexibility provided by access to cloud compute and storage, both technically and commercially makes cloud services compelling in many instances.
However, those compelling cases do come with a cost. Using hugely scalable public cloud technologies presents challenges, application architecture, system design but more often than not they are data issues, security, governance, protection or even just moving big lumps of data around, all add to the challenge that comes with trying to enable these flexible cloud based services.
With that in mind, I took great interest in NetApp’s November 1st Hybrid Cloud announcements (You can find the press release here), especially the very strong emphasis on enablement, this was not your usual product range announcement. Often these announcements are almost “self serving”, get a new widget from, buy our updated solution or platform. Don’t get me wrong there is an element of that in these NetApp announcements, with updates to a couple of major products, but what was really interesting was the cloud service solutions that where mentioned, technologies that where not your “traditional” NetApp solution, no need for a hardware array, no need for ONTAP or anything else, these where purely service offerings that are designed for no other reason than to address the significant challenge of enabling our integration with cloud services.
I don’t plan on going into detail on all of the announcements, check out a great post like this from Mike Andrews (@trekintech) for wider analysis, I just wanted to look at a couple of the more generic cloud enablement solutions, that don’t need any “traditional” NetApp components.
Cloud Control for Office 365
In my experience, one of the early cloud integrations an enterprise will make is Office365, taking advantage of Microsoft’s Software as a service offering for email, document management and file storage. These services, which although critical, are often time intensive to deliver, while providing little additional value to the business, “table stakes” if you will, a company must have these things, but they 
are not going to give competitive advantage.
Giving it to Microsoft to run makes perfect sense, however one thing that is often missed when a business moves to 365 is data protection. Microsoft’s role is clear, it is to present you with a secure, scalable and resilient service, however it is not to protect your data. 365 offers several options for data retention, however, Microsoft do not protect you from data deletion, accidental or malicious, once that data is gone, it’s gone.
So how do you protect it? There is a growing market of solutions to this challenge and NetApp have now thrown their hat in to the ring with an extremely comprehensive offering.
Cloud Control is a full SaaS offering, no need to purchase equipment, or install anything on prem, take it as a service, point it at your 365 subscription and you have the capability to back up your Exchange, SharePoint and OneDrive for Business repositories.
What separates Cloud Control, in my opinion, is the number of possible backup targets you can use. If you have a NetApp environment, that’s great, you can take your 365 data and back it straight into your ONTAP environment, don’t have on-prem ONTAP? no problem, you can spin up ONTAP cloud and back off to that.
Don’t want ONTAP at all? Use AltaVault from the NetApp portfolio to move your data to an object store and of course, you don’t want anything at all from NetApp, no problem Cloud Control will allow you to move data straight into an AWS S3 bucket or an Azure storage blob.
Cloud Control provides granular data protection, with item level recovery for your 365 implementation, enabling you to deliver enterprise level data protection to your public cloud service.
Cloud Sync
A key benefit of cloud compute is the ability to get masses of processing power as and when you need it, without having to build a big compute cluster which spends most of its time idle.
Things like Hadoop are fantastic tools for data analytics, but it’s one heck of an expensive tool to deploy and has taken big data analytics away from many enterprises.
However, cloud providers like AWS have addressed this with services available to rent as you need them. The trick with these is, how do you move data to that analytics engine as and when you need it? how do we seamlessly integrate these services into our infrastructure?
Step forward the Cloud Sync service. Cloud Sync points at your on-prem NFS datastore (no it doesn’t have to be ONTAP based NFS) and your analytics service and seamlessly syncs the on-prem data to the analytics engine when needed, allowing you to take advantage of cloud compute, while ensuring your datasets are always refreshed.
Cloud Sync is all about automating those difficult tasks, and in modern IT, that is exactly what we are looking for, orchestrating the use of cloud compute allowing us to consume services in the most effective way.
Again, delivering this without the need for any of the more “traditional” NetApp technologies.
But Why?
I suppose this begs the question, why as a storage vendor, build solutions, that actively have no need for your storage products? Well let’s not be fooled, both of these services are NetApp subscription services, and of course both solutions can enhance existing NetApp technology, however I don’t think that’s the primary aim.
If you’ve ever looked at any of NetApp’s Data Fabric strategy, you’ll see that they are a very different storage company, who are much happier to talk about data strategy than selling you things, of course they have things that can enable your strategy, but a conversation about how we manage our data in this modern IT world, I see as something far more valuable than just selling something a bit faster, with a few more flashing lights, getting us to think about how we move, manage and secure data is far more important.
These November 1st announcements are just another example of NetApp’s commitment to its Data Fabric and how the right fabric can enable an organisation to fully exploit cloud flexibility, I very much look forward to seeing these solutions in action as they come to market and of course keen to see what NetApp add next to this increasingly impressive hybrid cloud story.
Cloud enabled captain…
For more detail on NetApp’s cloud solutions visit their cloud website where you can get information as well as access to trials of these services.
For some background reading on data fabric, please feel free to check one of my previous posts;
Data Fabric – What is it good for?
And if you have any questions, feel free to contact me @techstringy or on Linkedin.
For other posts with details on the announcements check out
Taylor Riggan’s View on Cloud Sync
Mike Andrews NetApp Hybrid Cloud Launch
And if you’d like a bit of audio to listen to, I also interviewed Mike Andrews for a TechStringy Interview discussing the announcements and their strategic and technical impact, feel free to have a listen here;
Techstringy 