The cloud-led, data centric software company is told during the recent NetApp Inshigt Emea, the virtual event this year in which business scenarios and strategies are traced. Announce new products to accelerate digital transformation by easily building and optimizing applications in cloud and on-premises environments

George Kurian, CEO of NetApp,is optimistic about the future as seen on the virtual stage of NetApp Inshigt 2020,the reference event for the vendor and its ecosystem of customers and partners: “For years we have been saying that the world is changing but no one would have imagined the amount and extent of the changes seen in 2020. Despite the challenges of recent months, we have learned a lot about ourselves and others. It was a difficult and delicate moment but we must be confident about the future. I am. We must prepare for such discontinuities and see them as constants, knowing that all this at the same time also opens up many opportunities. There is no doubt that Covid-19 has accelerated, replacing physical interaction with digital, remote and socially distant. The ways in which we interact with customers, partners and employees change, the companies themselves and entire sectors break down and recompose digitally in real time. It’s a disruption on a global scale with unprecedented speed.”

According to Kurian, speed and agility are requirements to succeed for a company, and the response to the pandemic has never been more evident. In this digital scenario, the cloud emerges as the reference platform and data are the new currency of digital business.

Specialists vs generalists Kurian photographs the current scenario.

Leading cloud providers are building extensive digital business platforms globally supported by consistent ecosystems: “In this design, those who stand out as specialists can leverage the sheer scale of these global platforms to reach customers around the world. And if traditionally these specialists were put to the test by the most generalist vendors, today the digital economy is rewriting the rules. It is the specialists who have the upper hand as they put their deep and specific skills developed over the years at the disposal of these platforms and their ecosystems.”

And this is what Netapp wants to do, whose transformation started well before Covid-19: “We wondered how digitalization and the cloud would impact the world, customers and the sector and we realized that it did not make sense to build your own cloud as the competition does; that’s why we chose to develop partnerships and collaborate with leading global cloud providers,” Kurian explains. A customer-centric visionA strategy to respond to the needs of customers who recognize the centrality of data: “Customers need a data fabric – a data factory – to provide the right data, in the right place and at the right time.

NetApp has been doing this for 28 years by making its expertise in data and cloud data services available through a portfolio of software and systems for data management, leveraging all this even in modern ways, to increase performance and efficiency – he says. Today, power is in the hands of specialists. We bring the efficiency and robustness of mission-critical business processes to public clouds and, conversely, the simplicity and flexibility of the public cloud to enterprise data centers, collaborating with global hyperescalers such as AWS, Google, IBM and Microsoft to build new innovation ecosystems, working on open architectures not legacy environments, giving customers the choice and protecting their investments. All future-proof: we have done so through new acquisitions, strengthening internal teams, continuing innovative software development and co-innovating with cloud providers”. On the virtual stage of the plenary session the top managers Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, Arvind Krishna, CEO of IBM and a top manager of AstraZeneca.

The cloud storage specialist of the Digital Era. For

NetApp, being the cloud storage specialist mainly means helping client companies develop, build and optimize new applications much faster on public, hybrid and multicloud, as well as embrace and grasp the best of the private and public cloud in order to release and scale digital business initiatives through ahybrid architecture recognized by the market and, finally, consolidate, modernize and automate the data center infrastructure with paths to the cloud.

In this sense, the Data Fabric strategy launched by the vendor in October 2017 to bring simplicity in the cloud direction is constantly innovating towards the logic of public cloud services, with the grafts of the most recent acquisitions such as Spot, Talon Storage and CloudJumper and with continuous improvements in Cloud Storage capabilities, to converge in a Highly optimized platform for application-driven infrastructures: “We combined serverless computing with the persistence of data storage in an infrastructure optimized for both enterprise and cloud-native applications and virtual desktops. Depending on where you are on your Digital Transformation journey, NetApp will be by your side,” says Kurian.

More cloud and

less costMore in detail, NetApp pushes on the concept’enterprise to cloud – cloud to enterprise’ – innovation runs here. Applications and workloads need optimized infrastructure, and NetApp responds with NetApp Public Cloud Service,a comprehensive cloud platform that combines compute and optimized storage – with Cloud Volumes, Spot (for cloud-native apps) and virtual desktop infrastructures. It is a platform to get more benefits from the cloud while maintaining cost control, through autonomous cloud storage and data management services, including serverless and storageless solutions for containers, able to scale elastically for the modern workplace.

As usual, NetApp Insight showcased some of the vendor’s most important technology announcements. Starting from the new release of ONTAP, 9.8, now available on all hyperscalers and in every region; the operating system for on-premise and cloud environments, developed in a logic of simplicity with an increase in efficiency of 33% compared to the previous release and with data security capabilities, today offers greater consolidation, deeper cloud integration and continuous availability of data.

Spot by NetApp contains the news related to the acquisition of the company Spot, known for a suite of products for the optimization and automation of cloud computing infrastructures. Spot Storage offers optimization services to model storage capacity and throughput to control cloud spending to meet application needs, while Spot by NetApp Kubernates is the answer for serverless computing for Kubernates 8 with visibility into container cost, utilization, and deployment.

Project Astra is the enterprise-grade data service for cloud-native applications while Kubernates Cloud inshigt steps in to optimize and monitor Kubernates clustered storage.

Also new for Cloud Manager, the centralized policy-driven console that simplifies the management of storage and data through the data fabric in public cloud and on premise environments.

And then NetApp Virtual Desktop Service 6.0 (VDS) and NetApp Virtual Desktop Management Service to simplify and optimize workplace management while reducing desktop cloud infrastructure spending by up to 50%.

Other announcements include netApp subscription service Keystone Flex to provide a fast and flexible path to a cloud-enabled data center with a pay-as-you-grow subscription formula for a cloud-like on-premises experience, and the new NetApp SolidFire Enterprise SDS that provides a simple, automated foundation for the private cloud with NetApp Element software as a stand-alone software-defined storage that can be deployed on any hardware.