Hybrid Cloud Clock - Data and Storage Management

It can certainly be called a milestone: namely, the announcement of the General Availability (GA) of Azure NetApp Files at the NetApp Summit in Amsterdam at the end of May. The new offering is the world's first bare-metal cloud file storage and data management service - as an exclusive Microsoft IaaS and PaaS cloud offering, Azure-native, and based on NetApp technologies and NetApp physical app hardware, respectively, and NetApp Ontap data management software.

This enables companies to migrate enterprise workloads to the Azure cloud and operate them there. For example, for databases, SAP applications or even high-performance computing applications. And without any changes. This was preceded by intensive development work and investment efforts by Microsoft and NetApp, which have been working closely together for over 20 years.

Preview Mode customers, some of whom are on the Fortune 100 list, spoke highly of their cloud use of Azure NetApp Files, saying that it exceeded expectations by delivering up to five times the performance of on-prem.

Likewise, many early adopters are exceptionally fond of options for massive capacity scale-up and scale-down, and the variable capacity-performance usage options in public cloud-only deployments.

Azure NetApp Files will certainly be the trigger for many companies from the SAP community to move even more SAP workloads to the public cloud or to push hybrid multicloud use cases - up to the migration of complete SAP infrastructures or SAP data centers to the cloud, in this case to Microsoft Azure.

With Azure NetApp Files, file system sizes within an Azure NetApp file share of up to 100 TB can be deployed. Hana-SAP certification for Azure NetApp Files is already underway. AnyDB has already been certified.

Proven functional advantages

Years ago, NetApp set out to complement its gold-standard solutions for the on-premises world with solutions for the cloud world and to enable mixed operating models or concepts of hybrid multicloud computing. And thus to act offensively as a hybrid cloud pacemaker.

The starting point: proven NetApp functional advantages from which companies worldwide derive their monetary benefit. These include, for example, compression, data deduplication, cloning or integrated data protection with continuous availability/high availability including storage-based backup, high-end performance and maximum scaling with the Clustered Data Ontap storage operating system through to the SaaS variant Cloud Volumes Ontap, which, by the way, is also in the portfolio and can be used with Azure.

The technical basis is the Data Fabric platform and a bundle of data services that ensure end-to-end connectivity in on-premises as well as cloud environments with overlapping functions.

This makes data management in the connected environments much simpler and significantly more transparent. This has an important effect in the age of digitization: Transformation projects, for example - the stringent use of the digital core SAP S/4 Hana or C/4 Hana or the promotion of DevOps models - can be implemented more quickly, more easily or in a much shorter time.

Uniform code base

For the NetApp cloud solutions Cloud Volumes Ontap as well as Azure NetApp Files, practically the identical Ontap with the same code base is used, which also serves on-prem as the core element for integrated data management. Whereby there is a modified version for cloud consumers.

This enables customers to access an NFS that has been "hardened" specifically for SAP operation and to use ontap features such as SnapShot and cloning. Backups for restore/recovery and SAP clone systems can also be created at the push of a button. It is also possible to repost data in object stores for long-term archiving.

NetApp has also ensured with developments that not only copies of data can be realized, but that secure and efficient data moves or necessary data synchronizations can be carried out in the context of hybrid multi-SAP cloud computing.

SAP customers who have been using third-party data management/storage systems in their SAP on-premises environment and prefer NetApp Cloud Volumes Ontap on Azure or Azure NetApp Files will be supported with proven NetApp transfer solutions/migration services. For example, with NetApp Cloud Sync.