NetApp and IBM Cloud partnership expands to support SAP workloads
Kim Stevenson
Digital transformation has been a hot topic for quite a while now, but the COVID-19 global pandemic has bumped its significance up to a matter of survival. Enterprise organizations looking to modernize their operations through transformation are realizing that cloud adoption is absolutely necessary.
In this era of rapid transitions, adopting a hybrid cloud solution model offers agility and flexibility that applications need. NetApp extends these hybrid cloud benefits to application data and storage with the performance required to manage growing data usage in the cloud, and to adjust quickly to new business demands.
This week IBM announced new services partnerships and capabilities to help clients accelerate their hybrid cloud journeys and deploy and run SAP software workloads wherever they choose—from the IBM public cloud to on premises. IBM and NetApp are continuing their innovation for enterprise SAP customers in IBM Cloud, building on years of our partnership to offer NetApp based storage in the cloud. Previously available only on premises, this amount of storage exceeds the needs of such SAP functions as Business Warehouse. And with bare metal servers scaling up to 12TB of physical RAM and 224 CPU cores, it can tackle some of the most rigorous SAP S/4HANA databases.
With NetApp® certified storage for SAP workloads, clients running large and highly complex enterprise workloads have access to this ultra-high-performance storage in IBM Cloud. Deployment and management services from IBM Services deliver control and management specifics to each enterprise. IBM’s announcement highlighted that IBM Cloud is uniquely positioned with the most performant and capable SAP-certified bare metal solutions of any cloud provider. And with NetApp as IBM Cloud’s storage provider for SAP, customers know that they’re getting an industry-proven storage solution at scale in IBM Cloud.
Customers can confidently accelerate their digital transformation of SAP workloads with NetApp storage in IBM cloud. We enable customers to get the most out of their data by helping them build their own unique data fabric, a common framework that simplifies the integration and orchestration of data services across on premises and their choice of cloud. The data fabric gives IT organizations the agility to meet the unprecedented need for responsiveness through leveraging data, wherever it resides.
Kim Stevenson
Kim Stevenson is Senior Vice President and General Manager of NetApp’s Foundational Data Services Business Unit (FDSBU), our largest business unit and helping to lead the charge into a new technology era. Kim most recently served as a senior executive with Lenovo as Senior Vice President and General Manager for the Data Center Group. With diverse experience spanning finance, services, and marketing, COO and CIO leadership roles at Intel, IBM, EDS, and HPE, and having served on numerous boards of directors for leading tech innovators, Kim brings a truly unique and well-rounded perspective to NetApp. She uses this diverse experience to tackle the business challenges customers care about most and simplify the overall IT experience for a world that is growing only more complex. Kim has won numerous awards including Silicon Valley Business Journal's Best CIO and Evanta Top 10 Breakaway Leader, Huffington Post's Most Social CIO as well as the CIO 100 award by CIO.com. She was named the Woman of Excellence Digital Trailblazer by the National Association of Female Executives (NAFE). In 2015, she won the Forbes CIO Innovation Award. Currently serving on the board of Boston Private Financial Holdings, Inc. and Skyworks Solutions Inc., Kim holds a Master of Business Administration degree from Cornell University and a Bachelor of Science degree from Northeastern University. In her free time, Kim is an avid tennis player and enjoys kayaking and paddle boarding.
