NetApp Reinvents the Customer Experience for the Hybrid Multicloud

NetApp announced its reinvention of the customer experience with NetApp Keystone, a program that offers a range of flexible solutions for customers whether they choose to build or buy their cloud infrastructure.

Organizations are digitally transforming to drive competitive advantage. They need to accelerate innovation in today’s real-time world while dealing with the complex reality that data and resources live anywhere and everywhere. In order to address this complexity, today’s IT environments must transform. While the industry has been focused on addressing these needs from a technology standpoint, the incremental improvements to financial options and to the upgrade process haven’t kept pace, until now.

“While the advent of hybrid multicloud brings incredible potential, it has also resulted in increasingly complex environments. At the same time, budgets have contracted this year, creating intense demand to optimize and streamline not only how infrastructures are orchestrated and managed, but also the economics around IT buying,” said Ashish Nadkarni, vice president of IDC’s Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and Technologies Group. “In introducing flexible consumption models and automation-focused products, NetApp is making it significantly simpler not only to use its own products and services, but for IT leaders to modernize, monitor and manage the entirety of their infrastructure.”

“In today’s environment, cloud sets the benchmark for customer experience,” said NetApp CEO George Kurian. “We’ve built and delivered the data fabric strategy to simplify and modernize our customer’s data centers and enable success in the hybrid cloud era. The solutions we are introducing today are an extension of that philosophy – what data fabric has done to simplify and integrate data infrastructure; our new flexible consumption models do at the business level.”

NetApp’s vision is to simplify the business of data services for customers from every perspective: from how they buy and consume products and services to how they run them in their environments and who services them. As a leader in storage systems and software and an innovator in cloud services, with a business that is growing by almost 200% year over year, only NetApp offers the full range of capabilities that customers need to build and manage their unique data fabric to solve the financial, operational, and technical barriers to adopting hybrid multicloud environments.

NetApp Keystone: The Customer Experience Reinvented

NetApp Keystone is a program that offers a range of flexible solutions for customers, whether they choose to build or buy their cloud infrastructure, on their premises or off. Keystone offers the agility, pay-per-use economics, dynamic scaling, and operational simplicity that customers need to be able to consume cloud on their own terms.

Keystone features:

• Flexibility to mix and match purchases and subscription payment methods
• Ability to run any NetApp service in any environment—on premises, cloud, and hybrid
• Freedom to choose how it’s all managed—by NetApp, a partner, or internally
• Simplified ownership experience that makes it easier to buy, operate and grow starting with NetApp’s new systems, the A400, FAS8300 and FAS8700

Keystone is designed to meet the reality of a hybrid multicloud world where IT teams need to have greater choice, flexibility, and freedom to run and pay for their data services however they want.

“NetApp’s data fabric strategy has been a key element in how we help our customers modernize their infrastructures,” said Ken Farber, President, ePlus Software. “With Keystone we can help our customers build their data fabric via a consumption model that simplifies the experience and complexity of navigating hybrid multi-cloud.”

Featured Portfolio Updates

Along with the new program and simplified customer experience, NetApp announced a number of updates throughout its portfolio, with a range of new product launches, enhancements, and integrations.

• AIOps. New integrated solution with Active IQ® and Cloud Insights offer access to NetApp’s exponentially growing data lake of IT infrastructure intelligence for real-time, one-click resolution of issues across an entire hybrid multicloud environment.
• Data security and protection purpose-built for hybrid multicloud. New data services provide security and compliance for key industries, including federal, defense, and critical infrastructure, in addition to enterprise-class protection and tiering of cloud data, regardless of the choice of cloud.
• New software and systems meet the demands of new and traditional enterprise applications. New flash storage systems and solutions and NetApp ONTAP® updates offer a wide range of performance options, simplicity to power enterprise and modern applications. Additionally, the AFF All SAN array delivers state-of-the-art resiliency and record-setting performance in the midrange.
• Cloud-agnostic DevOps. Leveraging Kubernetes, NetApp has created a redesigned model to allow true application portability and answer the economic factors and complexity concerns that have begun to plague modern DevOps. Based on NetApp’s own transformation, which connected the dots between three disparate solutions being used internally, we are providing the template for anyone to avoid vendor lock-in, lift and shift entire infrastructures, with the flexibility around anywhere workloads live.