The world of data management is changing; instead of data solely residing within a corporate data centre it is now spread across disparate infrastructure. Managing this data can prove a challenge to organisations requiring multiple tools and interfaces.
To solve this, NetApp is delivering a Data Fabric built for a data-centric world. NetApp Data Fabric simplifies and integrates data management across cloud and on premise to accelerate digital transformation
Features include; optimised to protect, designed for simplicity, created to embrace new opportunities and open to enrich choice.
Our webinar on Friday 27th October will explain the consistent and integrated hybrid cloud data services that NetApp Data Fabric delivers. Benefit from data visibility and insights, data access and control and data protection and security.
Ahead of our webinar we opened up the floor to Grant Caley, Chief Technologist at NetApp UK, to discuss the obstacles of the data-centric world:
The journey to the cloud is one which many customers are taking, a recent survey said that only 1% are not considering this move in some shape or form!
Customers move data and workloads into cloud environments and services, often without the levels of due diligence that they would normally consider when deploying on-premise. Surprising as that may seem, we see this more often than not.
So what does that mean? Well, customers are moving data into the cloud and relying on the cloud provider to ensure that their data is highly available, backed up, secure and properly managed and governed.
In most cases cloud providers do provide highly resilient services, but what is often not provided are services such as backup, enhanced security, governance and control.
These are the challenges that customers face which are especially difficult when multiple clouds are used, each with their own level of services and capabilities.
With a cloud or multi-cloud environment, NetApp’s Data Fabric provides a common approach to high availability, data protection, governance and control - and offers the added benefit of reducing cloud costs as well.
Raw storage from a cloud provider is akin to the simple raid array provided for on-premise deployment; it provides capacity, performance (although this is often shared in the cloud) and availability.
What’s not provided - and is essential when considering deploying enterprise data - are all the equally important features such as instant backup and recovery, cloning and storage efficiency.
Modern on-premise deployments, especially those based on NetApp, provide this as default - and the lack of these in the cloud impacts data reliability and protection, as well as the cost of deploying into the cloud.
NetApp takes the same on-premise features customers rely on and brings these to cloud environments such as AWS and Azure. A layer of NetApp in the cloud provides enhanced security and data protection, and can significantly reduce Cloud storage costs, all while building a common data fabric back to a customer’s on-premise environment(s).
As to why cloud provider raw storage is not capable of this; it most likely relates to providing a common denominator across a range of abstracted hardware in their data centre. These features are complex to deliver, so the default is not to. With a layer of NetApp Data Fabric on top customers can regain control of their data in the cloud.