NetApp and VMware in 2018

The VMworld US 2018 announcements

As a NetApp United and VMware vExpert member, I have access to a huge amount of information from both vendors. Especially around VMworld 2018, which is being held this week in Las Vegas, a lot of announcements are being made that attracted my attention.

NetApp Validated Architecture for NetApp HCI

Since 2017 NetApp has combined its SolidFire products with servers and an automation layer in the form of NetApp HCI. This offers a Software Defined Storage platform that in combination with VMware vSphere offers a very easy to realize Private Cloud solution.

Knipsel

This creates a Hyperconverged Infrastructure that is highly scalable with storage and compute separately scalable. Within a 2U chassis, 4 storage or compute nodes can be mixed to suit the requirements of the platform. By using different types of storage or compute nodes, the environment can be made to measure and can also be flexibly adjusted to be future-proof.

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Although through the NetApp Deployment Engine, a simple management interface, the rollout of NetApp HCI is done quickly, the work of the vSphere administrator has just started. Implementation of Network Virtualization (NSX), Monitoring (vRealize Operations and Log Insight) and Automation (vRealize Automation). Quite a lot of work and something that requires a proper design to start with. Fortunately, NetApp now offers a NetApp Validated Architecture (NVA) for this purpose.

The new NetApp Validated Architecture provides a reference architecture that describes all these components in combination with NetApp HCI. This reference architecture describes the creation of a Private Cloud, in which insight, automation and the possibilities for linking public cloud services that we are used to from VMware are linked to the data protection, data mobility and availability that NetApp has to offer.

NetApp HCI new Storage Node

Following the new NetApp HCI reference architecture, NetApp has also announced new storage nodes for HCI and SolidFire. These not only offer more capacity and performance, but also a lower price per GB than the existing Storage Nodes.

H610

NetApp & VMware Cloud on AWS

Recently, I have been hearing more and more customers using the Public Clouds. Often driven by costs, but also by functionalities such as disaster recovery, backup/archive and speed of scaling up. An important argument for customers is having flexibility. Which workloads do we want to run in the public cloud, and do we still want to do that the day after tomorrow? Application and data mobility are still difficult scenarios in the public cloud. The costs and effort involved in deploying applications and data in the public cloud are quite low. The retrieval is often the opposite and therefore a lock-in is often a fact.

With VMware Cloud on AWS, vSphere’s own environment can be expanded with physical ESXi hosts in the Amazon cloud. This means that there is no need for conversion between private and public cloud and the application remains mobile via vMotion.cloudscenario's

NetApp has been offering its services in the public cloud for some time now. With services such as NetApp Cloud Volume Service, which offers NetApp storage as a service in AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, or NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP, which offers a NetApp in AWS and Azure that can be self-managed where standard features such as SnapMirror are possible.

These services were now mainly intended for File services through NFS and CIFS. The IT infrastructure certainly needs this, but NetApp functionalities such as snapshots, flexclones and SnapMirror are missed within a public cloud.

To this end, NetApp has announced new functionality for VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC). It will now also be possible to offer datastores to the VMC Virtual Private Cloud from NetApp’s various cloud services. These can be accessed via AWS Direct Connect connectivity.

Netapp cloud solutions

This offers the possibility of using the NetApp Cloud Services in combination with the Private Cloud in the own data centre, in addition to the native AWS services. This ensures that all the data management options currently available in the Private Cloud can be extended to the Hybrid Cloud.

NetApp cloud volumes Service

Unfortunately, this service is not yet possible in all AWS regions. It is expected that this will, of course, be expanded.

More information

All in all a lot of interesting developments from our vendors. Whether these fit within your strategic choices is always the most important question. If you’d like to learn more about the announcements, make sure you read the following links:

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