Simplifying IT through unified storage with ONTAP

Managing enterprise infrastructure at scale is a balancing act between requirements, rationalization, broad-spectrum resilience, and architectural simplicity – all essential for enabling efficient operations at scale.

Since joining the company a few years ago, I’ve focused on estate management and single-pane-of-glass management patterns. These systems provide:

• Centralized management
• Change execution
• Status visibility
• Instrumentation

In my view, this is the only way to manage large estates efficiently, securely, and auditably – the latter being paramount in a heavily regulated environment.

As you might imagine, one of the focus areas has been storage. In addition to lots of data (> 100PB), our infrastructure footprint is heterogeneous, spanning multiple on-prem data centers and multiple hyperscalers (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP). Layer in storage types (block, file, object), transfer protocols (S3, FCP, NFS, iSCSI, CIFS, etc.), storage platforms ( SAN, NAS, Unified, S3/-Compatible, EBS, etc.), wide-ranging performance requirements, complex data residency requirements, resilience considerations (local HA + backup vs multiple AZ vs multiple regions), etc., and you’ve got a good old-fashioned hairball.  

My (exceptional) team and I have converged on unifying technology choices to maximize efficiency, security, and scalability. A universal approach to storage management has proven essential in reducing complexity while ensuring compliance, enabling resilience, and meeting the needs of a high-velocity business. 

I have an admission to make: a few years ago – before joining NetApp – I had a similar understanding of the NetApp portfolio to that of many of my peers in the industry. It's a great company with excellent file storage, and for decades, I’ve been a customer of NetApp in that context. Since joining the company and experiencing the capability range of ONTAP firsthand, it’s reshaped my perspective entirely. It’s not just about storage – it’s about unification. The ONTAP Operating System provides a common foundation for data resilience and security, something many of my peers may not realize until they see it in action or read a random blog.  

While it’s too late for a TL; DR, here's a punch line I whipped up before I expound a bit (pardon the amateur-hour attempt at marketing language): 

 ONTAP reduces complexity, simplifies management, improves security, and enables centralized control and visibility of your global storage portfolio—both on-prem and cloud-based – by providing a universal storage control plane. It allows seamless data management across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, reducing administrative overhead and simplifying operations. 

Like many others, I struggled with fragmented storage environments for years – separate solutions for block, file, and object storage, often spread across on-premises and multiple cloud providers. This fragmentation creates inefficiencies, increases costs, and makes security more difficult to manage (and let’s not forget my friends in audit). 

With ONTAP, IT organizations gain: 

• A single, scalable platform for managing all storage types across all platforms
• Seamless integration with major cloud providers
• Consistent data protection across environments – and this one is ‘yuge’ – more in a minute

Enterprise infrastructure is inherently complex. The goal isn’t to eliminate that complexity—it’s to make managing it easier. A scalable infra-portfolio management strategy has to focus on unification over more decentralized patterns, leveraging solutions that consolidate management, enhance visibility, and automate operations. Decentralized management, distributed patterns, and avoidable complexity just don’t work efficiently at scale, and those things are the breeding ground of unseen risk.  

With ONTAP, engineers / managers have visibility and management of storage workloads in AWS, GCP, Azure, and a range of on-premise systems in a single management console. This isn’t just a convenience – it’s a necessity. SPOG management provides the ability to: 

• Monitor and manage data movement across platforms, enabling seamless data portability
• Enhance security and compliance with multiple built-in protections
• Simplify disaster recovery and ransomware resilience

Ransomware attacks are no longer a matter of if but when. But as we all read about (and some of us lose sleep over), many organizations only realize their vulnerabilities during audits or worse – when something terrible happens. Even security-conscious businesses often have gaps in their ransomware defense strategies due to the endless permutations of storage types, infrastructure class, location, etc.

NetApp’s ransomware protection allows organizations to mitigate these risks across storage types (various on prem and cloud-based storage), and with single pane of glass simplicity, offering:

• Autonomous Ransomware Protection (AI-based technology)
• Tamperproof snapshots for rapid recovery
• Multi-admin verification (MAV) to prevent unauthorized changes (works like the two launch keys)
• Data Infrastructure Insights Storage Workload Security

Each technology performs a different, complementary role in mitigating ransomware risk. They can be applied to on-premises and cloud workloads.  

If I can offer advice, go deep on immutability in your storage portfolio. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard of, in various contexts, scenarios where people believed they had immutable backups only to learn that they weren’t truly immutable.

Defense in depth of your data isn’t just about compliance – it is existential.

Unification and centralized management are the paths to simplicity: Consolidating storage management of your on-premise and cloud-based workloads under ONTAP reduces complexity, enhances operational efficiency, and enables broad security coverage – all in a single pane of glass. 

A universal storage control plane streamlines multi-cloud management and security. 

Ransomware resilience must be proactive: IT leaders need to advocate for comprehensive security strategies before threats materialize. 

Automation is the future: IT skill sets are shifting toward IaC, making technology rationalization more critical than ever. 

IT environments are only growing more complex. The key to navigating this reality isn’t adding more tools – it’s choosing the right ones. A unified storage strategy that enables simplification and resilience ensures that IT teams can confidently scale, secure, and automate their operations. 

By embracing simplicity and unification, IT leaders can transform their infrastructure, making it more resilient, efficient, nimble, and future-ready.