I recently attended Cloud Field Day in the Bay area and one of the companies I had the privilege of meeting with for a product strategy review was NetApp. If you are familiar with NetApp they are traditionally a storage provider, but they are moving forward with a new visionary shift that will change them from a storage company to a data company. I was personally surprised to hear this since I really only think storage when I hear the company name NetApp, but on their journey to becoming a data company they are making quite the transition to the cloud.
The Team = Passion for Technology
While visiting the NetApp headquarters we had the pleasure of hearing from CTO – Mark Bregman, SVP of the Cloud Business Unit -Anthony Lye, and Dave Hitz – Executive VP and Founder of NetApp. The energy from the team was that of excitement, and welcomed after the many presentations we were given from the various companies during the event. The passion for technology shown by this team makes it very clear that they plan to be a player in the growing and evolving cloud market today.
“Moving beyond the storage layer into the data layer” – Mark Bregman, CTO
The Cloud
Their journey to the cloud so far has them managing over 240 petabytes of cloud data today. You may already be familiar with their ONTAP on-premises product. I can honestly say I was not, but if you are still take the time to look at the ONTAP cloud solutions. The product offering for the cloud will help you migrate to Azure or AWS which I personally found interesting.
So what else is in that 240 petabytes of data?
They offer tools such as AltaVault which is a backup gateway that today is connected to 23 cloud infrastructures today. They have an Office 365 Backup tool, and even NetApp CloudSync which appears to be a handy tool for developers looking to sync data to the cloud and bring it back down on-premises, so much more from an offerings perspective.
The Foundation in Place – more to come
So, the foundation is in place for cloud. They are delivering services today that meet the immediate needs of many organizations. What I am looking forward to next is learning what the final solutions suite will look like for the long run. With the passion this team has I am anticipating something good.