NetApp and VMware partner to power the multi-cloud era

NetApp and VMware have announced the expansion of the companies' longstanding global alliance. Through innovative solutions and go-to-market initiatives, NetApp and VMware are helping customers reduce the cost, complexity and risk of migrating and modernizing enterprise-class workloads in multi-cloud environments. In addition, organizations can accelerate the performance and delivery of both traditional and new modern applications, and simplify daily operations through new integrations between VMware and NetApp data management infrastructure.

The NetApp and VMware partnership is built on the foundation of shared experience supporting twenty thousand 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, 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 are 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."

"Building on more than two decades of co-innovation, we are glad to see an expanded and strengthened alliance between NetApp and VMware," said Sanjay Rohatgi, Senior Vice President and General Manager, NetApp Asia Pacific & Japan. "As APAC organizations transform their digital infrastructure to prepare for the hybrid multi-cloud era, NetApp will continue to bring together the best technology partners to support the ecosystem, every step of the way."

The renewed partnership between NetApp and VMware addresses these challenges through focusing on three major customer-driven initiatives -

• Cost-Effective & Seamless Migration to Multi-Cloud – NetApp and VMware are currently innovating together 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 either 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. Customers can now right-size their cloud compute and storage architectures to reduce and control the costs of running data-demanding workloads in the cloud at scale, while also avoiding the costs of refactoring applications from on-premises into the cloud. NetApp and VMware have taken their decades of experience in managing enterprise workloads in the data center to deliver fully certified, integrated and supported solutions that bring these same benefits to customers leveraging the public cloud, all built on a trusted workload and data management foundation.

• 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 the use of NetApp ONTAP-based storage arrays, providing customers the ability to seamlessly build out 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 enable the use of vVols with NVMe-oF to allow enhanced block storage flash performance and more granular VM storage management over multiple types of network transports 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.