Zen and the art of running VMware in the cloud

In the cloud world, you often hear about the importance of having a “multicloud strategy.” Having a multicloud strategy means you have defined the role of the cloud in your organization and you have a plan for success. A multicloud strategy is neat. It’s orderly. It’s smart. (One might even say, “cloud smart.”) But, for many organizations, it’s a far cry from today’s reality. 

In his VMware Explore keynote this year, VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram revealed the messy truth about multicloud strategies: Most hybrid multicloud environments are born from “cloud chaos,” with rampant shadow IT stemming from disparate departments acting independently from central IT.

It turns out that becoming “cloud smart” doesn’t happen overnight. VMware describes the journey to the cloud in three phases: cloud first, cloud chaos, and cloud smart. Most organizations are past the initial phase of being cloud first. They’ve embraced the cloud and now find themselves entrenched in the chaos of managing their applications across a multitude of cloud choices. And this is where the majority of organizations find themselves today.

Cloud chaos is characterized by siloed infrastructure and an inconsistent experience across cloud environments. To bring order to the chaos, central IT departments must enable a consistent, multicloud view without preventing developers from accessing the cloud they want, when they want it. 

And there’s no one that can bring it all together like NetApp. At VMware Explore, we announced the availability of the VMware Cloud on AWS integration with Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP—the only integrated, certified, and supported external NFS datastore for VMware Cloud on AWS.

Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP can make it less expensive to run VMware in the cloud by decoupling storage and compute. And because the technology is NetApp^® ONTAP^®, the processes, services, and IT talent you already use in your on-premises environments can be leveraged in the cloud. Hear directly from AWS, VMware, and NetApp about how we’ve joined forces to bring order to the chaos, and check out our TCO calculator to learn how much you could save.  

But you don’t want to use just one cloud. If you did, life would be a lot simpler. Modern organizations are multicloud. And only NetApp has a clear path to any cloud: AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. Unlike our competitors who are still focused primarily on private cloud, NetApp has deep integrations with the world’s leading hyperscalers and decades of experience in private, hybrid, and public cloud alignment and innovation with VMware. There’s a reason that NetApp was the only storage vendor mentioned by name in this year’s VMware Explore keynote. 

NetApp integrates with all three of the major hyperscalers, bringing enterprise tools, insights, and data protection to VMware in the cloud. So you can accelerate application development, enable a consistent experience, and deliver a frictionless user experience. That’s pretty smart.

To learn more about our cloud solutions for VMware and the technologies that bring order to cloud chaos, visit our NetApp for VMware page.