Your Data Demands More NETAPP ENABLES YOU TO LEVERAGE YOUR DATA & COMPUTE FROM ANYWHERE

Transcription

1 Your Data Demands More NETAPP ENABLES YOU TO LEVERAGE YOUR DATA & COMPUTE FROM ANYWHERE

2 IN ITS EARLY DAYS, NetApp s ( primary goal was to build a market for network-attached storage and to dominate that market. And that s exactly what it did. The proliferation of disparate computing systems and the need to store and share data within and among organizations were underway, and NetApp developed the technology to tackle those complex requirements with simple-to-use solutions. Today NetApp sees another problem it can solve: the proliferation of data and applications across multiple types of hardware and software. Organizations now have data stored in multiple locations, both on-premises and in the cloud, and they use a variety of applications and services, some of which reside on-premises while others involve multiple cloud service providers. Managing this situation requires a great deal of resources, which can leave IT departments overtaxed and draw energy away from the core tasks of running the business. NetApp recognizes that organizations shouldn t have to devote excessive resources to managing a bunch of different storage systems and architectures, much less managing the interplay between them. And NetApp believes organizations shouldn t have to get locked in to using a particular vendor in order to contain these problems. They should instead be free to concentrate on the thing that s most important to them: their data. The Solution Is In The Fabric Back during NetApp Insight 2014, the company s annual technical conference for storage and data management professionals, executives including George Kurian, then EVP of Product Operations and now CEO, introduced a new concept for data management in the hybrid cloud called Data Fabric. With early examples of Data Fabric solutions, such as NetApp Private Storage for Microsoft Azure and ONTAP Cloud for AWS, customers could manage data seamlessly across on-premises and cloud locations, providing unified access to data regardless of its location. At that time NetApp s perception of the cloud was changing, says Mark Bregman, Senior Vice President and CTO of NetApp. As customers chose to move their data to Amazon and other public clouds, it moved off of data center storage, which was our business, and that was viewed initially as a threat. By 2014, he explains, NetApp switched from viewing the cloud as a competitor to viewing it as an opportunity, and began thinking of ways it could help customers interact with or manage their data not only in NetApp on-prem storage, but also in the cloud. Since then, the multiplicity of vendors and proliferation of data and applications has become an even greater If you think about our business historically as being storage, we re moving up a level because what s really the value to customers isn t storage, it s data. Mark Bregman Senior Vice President & CTO NetApp issue for organizations. If you think about an enterprise environment today, it has many different places where corporate data is stored, says Bregman. Some of it is stored, hopefully, on NetApp systems at their data center, and some of it is stored on other vendors systems in their data center EMC, Hitachi, Dell, you name it. A lot of data is also being stored in SaaS [software as a service] providers platforms Office 365, Workday, etc. And finally there is an increasing amount of data being stored in things that are built on the public cloud, like Amazon Web

3 NetApp s Data Fabric Vision... Compliance & Governance Is my data compliant with geographic regulations? Is my data compliant across the hybrid cloud? Security Can I be alerted about suspicious activity? Can I ensure only the right people see the data? Copy Data Management Can I have multiple recovery points? Can I use data copies for test/dev, analytics, & other use cases? Services, Microsoft Azure, or IBM SoftLayer. Data Fabric, Bregman explains, is akin to a data operating system. Bregman points to ONTAP, NetApp s storage software, as a point of comparison, because it similarly serves as a storage operating system. ONTAP, Bregman says, spans many different kinds of storage, provides a unified way to think about it and operate that storage, and provides an abstraction of the underlying systems. In the same way, the Data Fabric is a data operating system. It spans many different storage systems, abstracts them so that a user say, a developer building a solution on the Data Fabric doesn t need to understand the various complexities of how to talk to NetApp vs. EMC vs. Amazon, etc. The Data Fabric provides a higher-level interface, a higher-level API that the user can call on. The Data Fabric does all the work to answer the user s question or perform the action the user requests. A Broad Architecture To Bring It All Together In an April 2016 white paper, NetApp Data Fabric Architecture Fundamentals (cloud.netapp.com), NetApp laid out its ongoing plans to transition Data Fabric from a strategy built around its own solutions to an architecture capable of spanning a growing variety of IT resources, storage methods, and clouds, and spanning multiple vendors. The design principles for this architecture, according The Data Fabric is a data operating system. It spans many different storage systems. to the white paper, would include user control and governance regardless of the data s location; user choice for clouds, ecosystems, and platforms, with the ability to change among them on demand; the integration of all components at every layer so that the value of all parts of all systems are always within reach; user access to data and applications however and whenever they re needed; and consistent management solutions so that separate systems can be maintained using a standard set of tools. The guiding principle for Data Fabric is a recognition that data, as NetApp puts it, is the currency of the digital economy. Bregman offers the example of moving a customer s database from a NetApp storage system to Amazon Web Services; the data, and what can be done with it, is more important to the customer than the specific systems on which it resides. If you think about our business historically as being storage, we re moving up a level because what s really the value to customers isn t storage, it s data. What s valuable to you as a customer of the bank isn t the vault, it s the services for your money. That s the analogy, and that was the realization we came to. Over the last 12 months, we really started to realize that for it to be most effective it has to go beyond a loose collection of services or a strategy and really become a foundation that other people can build on top of not just NetApp, but customers, partners, and even independent developers.

4 ... addresses hybrid cloud customer needs Cost, Plan, & Manage Where is my data? Can I find the data I need? How much is my data costing me? Data Mobility Can I move my data according to my needs? Can I make data available to the services that need it? Other Data-Centric Services What other services will we need that we don t yet know about? Openness Is Vital As Bregman explains, there are three key elements to Data Fabric. We re building it to be heterogeneous, to support every possible storage endpoint possible. We re building it to be open, which means that it s extensible; if someone comes along with a great idea for a new service that really ought to be part of the fabric itself, part of the operating system, then we re very open to having it be added, to extend that service and extend the Data Fabric. And finally, it has to have a set of common and stable APIs on top of which people can build, and these must be open and public. Say, for example, a company wants to build an ediscovery service. Its challenge, Bregman says, is that the data involved is scattered, and yet the ediscovery application must be able to interact with data on disparate storage systems across on-premises and the cloud. NetApp s goal with Data Fabric is to enable the customer to build its ediscovery service, even though it may involve competitors, and beyond that to make the process exceedingly easy for the customer. This kind of openness, says Bregman, means a couple of interesting things from NetApp s point of view. It means that people can compete with us. People can build storage systems that plug into our Data Fabric that compete with our storage systems. That s OK. That s the nature of an open platform. Likewise, people could build services or solutions on the Data Fabric that might NetApp is extremely involved in OpenStack. It is also making the Data Fabric open. compete with services or solutions that we choose to build. That s OK also. NetApp is extremely involved in OpenStack and leverages what it can from both OpenStack and other open source communities, says Bregman. But it s also the case that we want to make the Data Fabric itself very open. How this openness will manifest itself is evolving as NetApp builds its Data Fabric. Because there are very specific implications about licensing, patents, and IP, Bregman explains, it may be the case that NetApp will make Data Fabric truly open source or open in the sense that anyone can participate, with an open governance model, but with the software itself not open source. This would be similar, he says, to Apple s App Store. The App Store is open. The APIs are public, and you can use them, and you can create an app, and you can contribute it to the App store, and it s available for other people to use. And if you choose to make the APIs available, they can build on it, but it s not open source. You re not giving the software away, and you re not giving up your rights to the IP. And there s a governance model, because clearly Apple wants to retain some control, just like Linux is open source but not everything that everyone brings to it gets in there. Regardless of the eventual manner and extent of the Data Fabric s openness, its organic, open nature is a crucial part of its value. The cloud vendors have generally not entirely, but generally had the view that everything s

5 NetApp s Data Fabric Vision spans multiple clouds... going to be done in their cloud, says Bregman. And yet the reality is we see our customers having the need to do things everywhere. They re going to have some data that s in their existing legacy on-prem systems. They may even build new on-prem storage systems for certain kinds of data. And they are going to leverage the cloud for certain things. From a customer point of view, he says, they need the ability to manage that heterogeneous environment. The second thing is that customers and partners need the opportunity to add to basically innovate quickly in this space. And so by creating a layer of software that s open and simplifies or abstracts the complexity of storage, we think we can help accelerate innovation, the creation of new services, and the creation of new capabilities, even those that we don t have the resources to create. So we don t want to be the bottleneck, with everyone waiting for NetApp to build the next great thing. The third issue, Bregman continues, is that there s often a need to be able to tie together a bunch of different services or capabilities to manage a customer s data center. These different services and capabilities are all data-related, but they need to be integrated. Bregman draws a comparison between NetApp s Data Fabric vision and IBM s revolutionary mainframe systems developed in the 1960s. One of the most brilliant things IBM ever did was to come up with the idea of an operating system that was not tied to a single system, a single machine. They built the IBM System/360 to cover everything from the smallest to the largest system, and to provide a unified way of doing things. In a sense, we ve never done that in the data world. So we re saying let s build a unifying layer of software, the Data Fabric, that allows one to manage data in a uniform way, regardless of where it s stored, from large to small environments, from on-prem to off-prem, from private to public cloud and SaaS. What this will do is simplify the challenges our customers have and I believe unleash an entire new round of innovation in how people use and manage data. Partners Make The Data Fabric Stronger NetApp s Data Fabric works with numerous partner companies, including Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM, and its success will grow with increased partner involvement covering a variety of technologies. When you consider security, for instance, in one sense individual storage systems

6 ... multiple storage types, and even multiple storage vendors E-Series FAS E-Series StorageGRID Webscale AVA / AltaVault ONTAP Other Vendors provide their own security in the form of encryption, access control, and other security mechanisms. The Data Fabric will be able to connect into those access control mechanisms, but the Data Fabric itself can provide data access control and data security, Bregman says. That s an area, he says, where NetApp will likely build some services, but he suspects that partner companies will also be involved. Varonis, he says, is a data security company that builds on some of our existing APIs, the early instantiation of the Data Fabric, and they have some powerful data security tools that leverage our underlying data layer. Another partner, IBM SoftLayer, works with NetApp to extend their own cloud further. And Red Hat, Bregman says, works with us in a number of areas around OpenStack and open source, and they see this as a way to extend the open world, if you will, to the data layer. NetApp Data Fabric, Bregman says, is both a current reality and a journey. At this year s NetApp Insight conference in Las Vegas, NetApp expanded on the concept of Data Fabric as an architecture. At next year s conference, Bregman says, I hope we can show a series of partners who have built things on the NetApp Data Fabric, we can show some customer use cases where people have deployed it and gotten benefits.... The year after that we ll show you even more. A Consistent, Seamless Experience Over the past two years, NetApp has laid the foundation for extending on-premises storage and management into the cloud, enabling organizations to expand beyond their own data centers. Now NetApp is moving up-stack to offer higher-level data management capabilities that are truly heterogeneous, encompassing even non-netapp products and solutions. Whatever your storage and data management needs purpose-built storage systems, software-defined storage, large-scale on-demand compute, or the ability to write and test new applications using cloud-based tools, to name a few NetApp offers solutions that can be deployed on-prem or in the cloud, with a consistent, seamless data management experience regardless of where your data is located. To find out more about how NetApp s Data Fabric and solutions can benefit your organization, visit cloud.netapp.com.