These days, it would be easy to think that the public cloud is the only storage solution worth investing in. As new app deployment continues to move away from traditional IT to new DevOps groups, the public cloud gives developers immediate and direct access to infrastructure resources and to developer-friendly platform resources without having to hassle with IT.
For NetApp partners like you, this shift means helping customers make a major move away from on-premises storage, right? Not so fast. Even as DevOps teams build new apps on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform, and Azure, there are still plenty of legacy systems that are impractical to move to the public cloud. In addition to those legacy systems, there is a substantial amount of data that has already been produced that can’t be easily moved.
To work effectively, all those new public cloud–based apps often must interact with legacy on-premises apps, requiring further on-premises development. When your customers consider this requirement along with the high cost of public cloud usage, many of them start to realize that there’s still value in on-premises storage. At the same time, it’s understandable that no one wants to adopt yesterday’s operating models to build tomorrow’s apps.
One solution for your customers is to work with a major public cloud provider to create a hybrid approach. While making it fast and simple to get on-premises cloud capabilities, this approach creates a “walled garden” that keeps your customers’ apps and capabilities tied to a single vendor’s overall ecosystem. It also limits application architecture to one set of proprietary services.
For many of your customers, those restrictions and limitations are a nonstarter. Their modern DevOps approach calls for workloads to be portable and agnostic, working as well on the premises as they do in the cloud, and without vendor lock-in.
NetApp® technology helps you offer customers another way of meeting their on-premises and cloud needs. We offer a portfolio of private cloud products and solutions that are delivered by the NetApp Data Fabric and hybrid cloud infrastructure. You can give customers the ability to create and run modern applications on the premises, in a public cloud, or any combination of the two.
By using NetApp solutions to help your customers build their own private cloud, you can help them achieve several benefits, including:
- Complete integration that enables customers to start anywhere, to run anywhere, and to manage everywhere through a shared experience across public and private clouds
- A common consumption experience across clouds that helps development teams build new services faster
- The ability to use NetApp’s open and flexible products to leverage best-in-class solutions from multiple vendors while future-proofing investments
- Self-service that simplifies how users consume, deploy, and manage infrastructure
- Automation that takes care of all the complexities of cloud, so customers can focus on what’s most important to their business
- Predictive and proactive analytics through the NetApp Active IQ® intelligence engine, which uses artificial intelligence, machine learning, and NetApp community wisdom to deliver deeper insights into customers’ data management environment
