Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 69 | Page 56

INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Cloud

NetApp and VMware strengthen global partnership to help customers modernise with multi-cloud

NetApp , a global , cloud-led , datacentric software company , and VMware have announced the expansion of the companies ’ longstanding global alliance .

Through innovative solutions and go-tomarket initiatives , NetApp and VMware are helping customers reduce the cost , complexity , and risk of migrating and modernising enterprise-class workloads in multi-cloud environments .
The NetApp and VMware partnership is built on the foundation of shared experience supporting twenty thousand mutual customers over more than 20 years . NetApp is a consistent VMware strategic design partner for current and future VMware Cloud offerings including VMware vSphere , VMware Cloud Foundation and several VMware Cross-Cloud services . NetApp and VMware are helping customers to effectively manage , share and protect their hybrid and multi-cloud environments by collaborating on customer-driven co-engineering to offer innovative solutions across an ever-changing technology landscape .
“ Customers today are faced with complex challenges to optimise their current IT investments while laying a path forward to modernise and accelerate their business ,” said George Kurian , Chief Executive Officer , NetApp .
“ Together , NetApp and VMware have helped thousands of customers solve their multi-cloud challenges by effectively managing their enterprise workloads in any environment . By delivering powerful new solutions that help companies optimise their virtual data centres , modernise their applications and provide cost-efficient , enterprise-class data management services
George Kurian , Chief Executive Officer , NetApp
to VMware Cloud , we can meet customers anywhere they are on their cloud journey .”
“ At this stage it ’ s clear : multi-cloud is the model we ’ re going to rely on for many years to come ,” said Raghu Raghuram , Chief Executive Officer , VMware . “ It is the de-facto operating model for the digital era , giving customers the freedom required to build , deploy and manage applications in the way that best suits their business requirements . “ Together , VMware and NetApp offer businesses the multi-cloud flexibility and choice they need to leverage the best innovations in any cloud environment .”
NetApp and VMware : powering the multi-cloud era
The new wave of modern applications powering this digital age requires an innovative approach to enterprise workload and data management infrastructure . Organisations today are turning to the public cloud to simplify and accelerate their business initiatives and require flexibility and choice across leading public cloud providers These organisations also need new and integrated platforms that can manage both enterprise and modern applications while efficiently utilising existing resources . The renewed partnership between NetApp and VMware addresses these challenges through focusing on three major customerdriven initiatives :
• Cost-effective and seamless migration to multi-cloud – NetApp and VMware are currently innovating together across the world ’ s three largest public cloud providers to certify and support VMware Cloud and NetApp Cloud Services . This helps customers running on VMware utilising either NetApp or non-NetApp storage environments on-premises to seamlessly migrate , extend or protect data-demanding enterprise workloads and files to the cloud with reduced cost and risk . Customers can now right-size their cloud compute and storage architectures to reduce and control the costs of running data-demanding workloads in the cloud at scale .
• Accelerate modernised applications using Kubernetes / containers – VMware Cloud Foundation with Tanzu allows IT to manage virtual machines and orchestrate containers from one unified platform . VMware Tanzu and VMware Cloud Foundation support the use of NetApp ONTAP-based storage arrays , providing customers the ability to seamlessly build out a flexible data fabric for traditional VMs and modern , containerised applications .
• Optimise the data centre through modernised infrastructure – Organisations today require an efficient , cost-effective workload and data management platform to optimise existing resources . NetApp is a VMware codesign partner with vSphere and vVols for new and expanded support of key technologies from NetApp file and block storage platforms .. p
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