NetApp Further Embraces Channel-Driven Digital Transformation

During the NetApp 2018 Insight event in Barcelona, NetApp CEO George Kurian made some bold statements about the future of digital transformation as it relates to the importance of the data-driven enterprise. Kurian’s primary points focused on how the world is changing and data is becoming the fuel of business, so enterprises must adapt to the ideology of using data to drive decisions, fuel innovation and achieve growth.

NetApp’s George Kurian

The data-driven ideology espoused by Kurian exemplifies a tremendous opportunity for the channel, and NetApp is delivering the technology that will help its partners achieve digital transformation and bring their clients into the world of data-driven decisions. The company announced improvements to MAX Data, software that is designed to run on application servers and boost performance. Max Data improves data performance by using the ideology of memory accelerated data, where solid state technology is optimized to bring low latency and high performance to applications and data, bringing forth an ideology that scale is just as much about size, as it is about speed. Channel partners can leverage Max Data to drive digital transformation and build speed into solutions that previously relied on spinning media. The company is offering extensive use cases that illustrate how performance now has a symbiotic relationship with digital transformation.

The company is also improving its NetApp HCI offering. NetApp HCI is the NetApp’s answer to the conundrum of hyperconvergence. The company is offering an ideology that states digital transformation requires IT transformation; in other words, the company is espousing that IT must become converged with business operations to achieve digital transformation. Channel partners often find themselves in the middle of that confluence, where business needs become part of the compute process. NetApp HCI brings forth a data fabric that simplifies the integration of private and public clouds to deliver business outcomes much faster.  NetApp is bringing more services to HCI, allowing solution providers to bring forth less complex hybrid cloud deployments, which supports a data-driven ideology.

It is also worth noting that NetApp is expanding its Cloud Volumes offerings, allowing solution providers and their customers a more global reach into public clouds. NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP operates as a data management solution for cloud workloads. With the service, solution providers can create a virtual fabric across multiple public and private clouds, allowing new endpoints to be brought into the enterprise environment. The concept behind Cloud Volumes ONTAP is to virtualize the cloud network fabric, regardless of where those endpoints are located. The product allows solution providers to create a fully managed private cloud-like experience using public clouds. Simply put, solution providers can build a secure data fabric with unified management that gives a single pane of glass view.

Ultimately the above outlined solutions bring forth the tools that can be used by the channel to create hybrid clouds that accelerate digital transformation.