Reach new heights of operational simplicity, security, and sustainability

Every day, we’re presented with more IT complexity, constant security threats, and economic challenges. We need to do more with less while preserving our environment today and for future generations—doing better, conserving more, and protecting resources. Both personally and professionally, we’re often tasked with rethinking the status quo if we want to succeed.

For personal success, I try to overcome hurdles by collaborating with others and embracing new resources, tools, and ideas. In a similar way, professional success requires us to break down our technical silos and not lose sight of the big picture. Embracing the tools and advanced technologies that simplify operations, increase security, and achieve sustainability goals across our on-premises and cloud environments—and our organizations—can help us solve huge challenges.

That’s why I’m excited about some groundbreaking advancements with NetApp^® BlueXP^™ and its services.

NetApp and BlueXP are right here with you the entire time.

As you know, NetApp BlueXP provides you with a unified experience for storage and data services across on-premises and cloud environments. Now, the new advances just released in BlueXP enable you to go even further, delivering more simplicity, increasing security capabilities, and helping you get even greener!

For example, the new AIOps-driven economic efficiency features help you plan capacity and prevent system outages caused by insufficient capacity. Intelligent insights identify NetApp AFF A-Series and C-Series arrays that are reaching capacity thresholds and recommend BlueXP tiering or additional storage shelves based on the forecasted usage. You can select the recommended configuration or adjust it to meet your specifications, then automatically request a quote from your preferred partner or from the NetApp sales team, streamlining the procurement process.

Additionally, the BlueXP digital wallet now delivers a deep breakdown of NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP^® entitlement utilization. This downloadable report includes usage and allocations across all hyperscalers. With this improvement in visibility, you can manage your cloud environments more intelligently and effectively.

And there’s another digital wallet feature that simplifies your entitlement management: improves how hyperscaler software-as-a-service (SaaS) charges are reported. These metrics can now help you identify charging issues, simplify troubleshooting, and quickly remediate those issues.

As we know, many highly regulated industries, including federal, state, and local governmental organizations and the military, must run workloads in restricted and private clouds. Keeping critical workloads, and environments secure is of the utmost importance, and we support you in doing so. Enhancements in BlueXP enable highly secure deployment modes, automatically identify and remediate security vulnerabilities, and federate user logins while securing critical user data.

New BlueXP restricted and private deployment modes let you use restricted hyperscaler or closed networks to manage your on-premises and cloud storage workloads and BlueXP services. Restricted mode has limited outbound connectivity and is typically deployed in government, sovereign cloud, or commercial regions. Private mode has the BlueXP Connector installed on-premises or in highly secured cloud regions, such as AWS Secret Regions, with no access to the BlueXP SaaS layer. Both are ideal for classified and compliance-sensitive workloads.​

Plus, BlueXP now takes securing your NetApp ONTAP^® firmware to a new level. To reduce potential firmware security risks, BlueXP operational resilience uses AIOps-driven intelligent insights to identify ONTAP firmware security gaps. BlueXP notifications and alerts inform you of potential security risks, with remediation that includes automatically patching the identified firmware, eliminating these across your ONTAP storage systems.

Finally, you can now federate your user logins with Auth0 while securing your users’ critical data with anonymized Auth0 federation.

We all know how important it is to protect our environment for the future. Well, now you can do just that with the BlueXP sustainability dashboard. You’ve been waiting for it, and now it’s live and ready to help you achieve your corporate sustainability goals. The sustainability dashboard is driven by the powerful artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) at the core of BlueXP. Its reporting provides details on energy consumption, power utilization, and your carbon footprint across NetApp AFF and FAS ONTAP systems—in one place, with a single point of control. By using the BlueXP sustainability score, you can see where you stand currently and forecast how specific changes can positively adjust that score. The dashboard delivers intelligent insights for fixing issues that can negatively impact your overall sustainability, with guided remediation to address those issues by category or cluster and work toward reducing your carbon footprint. Now you can improve your sustainability posture and meet corporate goals with real-time, actionable insights. See it. Use it. Get green with it.

It takes a lot to keep up with the modern world. We must stay in control but achieve the operational simplicity required to be effective. We must be secure but use the tools and resources necessary to stay that way. We must protect our precious resources for the future and embrace the technology that helps us achieve that goal. At NetApp, we’re here with you every step of the way.

Want to stay up to date with all BlueXP releases? Go to “Release Notes” of any NetApp product listed in product documentation and use the RSS feature to stay informed.

Contact us or visit the BlueXP overview to learn how you can achieve operational simplicity, stay secure, and get green with NetApp BlueXP.