Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop Innovating – INSIGHT ’21

This past week, I attended NetApp INSIGHT^® Digital 2021. It was exciting to watch so many legends toast NetApp’s marquee event, and also to watch NetApp unveil a series of innovation-driven products and features.

What excited me the most was NetApp’s boldness. We refuse to accept our legacy as it is – although we can confidently say that it’s a particularly good one. As developers, we are constantly disrupting ourselves, embracing change, and harnessing the power of new technologies to bring innovation to our customers. This mindset was clearly on display at INSIGHT, where we presented a series of hybrid cloud announcements, including ONTAP^® 9.10, Astra™ Data Store (preview), Cloud Manager, and much more.

Looking to our customers and their growing business needs as our North Star, we innovate nonstop to deliver the highest-quality technology to meet them where they are in their digital transformation journey. In case you missed it, here are a few of the ways we’re refusing to settle for our legacy – and how we’re looking to that North Star to build better.

The heart of the hybrid cloud just got even better for both on premises and public cloud

For nearly 30 years, we’ve been developing NetApp ONTAP and running it across the most demanding industry verticals – and it just keeps getting better. Today, it’s the industry's leading data management software. ONTAP combines unparalleled levels of simplicity, flexibility, and security with powerful data management capabilities, proven storage efficiencies, and leading cloud integration.

As data innovators, our work is never done. We know that protecting data is a top priority for our customers around the world – and with good reason. In the United States alone, the average remediation cost in 2019 for a company that suffered a ransomware attack was more than $761,000. In 2020, according to Forbes, that figure had more than doubled, to $1.85 million. We’re proud to remain committed to safeguarding data, which is why we introduced new ONTAP protection features that detect ransomware across the hybrid cloud. ONTAP proactively prevents data from being accessed, so customers can have peace of mind that their data is safe.

Data storage and services for cloud-native applications and developers

We continue to listen to our customers’ needs and evolve with them. We’ve built a portfolio of interconnected technology that helps customers focus on what matters most: running their business smoothly and efficiently. As my colleague Brad Anderson, EVP of the Hybrid Cloud Group, said at INSIGHT, “the old model was all about infrastructure management, and the new model is all about application lifecycle management. The key to lifecycle management is bringing intelligent data services data to Kubernetes.” For example, take Astra Data Store, which will accelerate customers’ adoption of cloud-native applications. Astra Data Store is one of the first in the industry to offer a shared file service that is native to Kubernetes and uses a standard NFS client as a unified data store for containers and VMs to reduce complexity.

Astra Data Store solves key data challenges that Kubernetes users face such as backup, restoration, and replication. It offers cloudlike simplicity through a native Kubernetes experience, empowering developers with automatic support for a broad set of apps and giving them dynamic storage that matches the flexibility of Kubernetes. We don’t innovate in silos, so we’re delivering end-to-end Kubernetes-native data management and storage. By leveraging ONTAP storage software functionality to containerized code and moving it into the Kubernetes space, we continue to develop the Astra family. We’re building excellent competencies in data management for our customers who are delivering their cloud-native strategies across a hybrid cloud.

Ubiquitous data management across the hybrid cloud gets even better

Beyond customer experience, keeping things simple is key. We’re simplifying administration across complex hybrid and multicloud environments from a single console through NetApp Cloud Manager, which introduced new digital wallet capabilities. Customers can now benefit from greater mobility and more visibility into their use of cloud service licenses, with prepayment of credits enabling streamlined deployment to avoid procurement hassles. We also enhanced Cloud Backup and Cloud Data Sense services, simplified deployment of Cloud Volumes ONTAP with new customer-ready templates, fully embedded Active IQ^®, and implemented deeper integrations with Cloud Insights and ONTAP systems to support Kubernetes workloads.

The announcements these past weeks and months are only the tip of exciting innovations to come. We couldn’t have accomplished these milestones to date without our engineering teams. I’m proud to say that our team has been part of every transformation in the industry, from physical hardware to virtual machines and now containers and Kubernetes. We're invested in helping our customers on their data center modernization journey so they can achieve the agility, speed, and flexibility to support meaningful business outcomes.

But innovation doesn’t stop moving from on premises to hybrid. So let’s see what my colleague Ronen Schwartz has to say in his latest blog post, “Innovating INSIGHT: Ronen's hyperscaler playlist.”