NetApp Extends Partnership with Microsoft Empowering Customers to Achieve More Through Cloud Adoption

Editor November 29, 2023

222 3 minutes read

NetApp® (NASDAQ: NTAP), a global cloud-led, data centric software company, today announced the next phase of its collaboration with Microsoft. NetApp delivers innovations to Microsoft Azure users that bring together cloud storage solutions through a range of services including Azure NetApp Files (ANF),NetApp BlueXP, Cloud Volumes ONTAP, and now CloudOps solutions from Spot by NetApp—all based on industry-leading NetApp and Microsoft technologies.

ANF is a purpose-built storage solution for the public cloud designed for all enterprise file workloads, delivering performance and data management capabilities previously expected from on-premises environments. Even the most demanding applications achieve this level of data performance with one of the lowest latencies seen before in the cloud—all within the fully-secure Azure Virtual Network (VNET). ANF offers a seamless way to add enterprise-grade data protection and disaster recovery architectures into the Azure ecosystem, ensuring their relevance in the context of public cloud workloads.

With the Azure software-defined networking enhancements for ANF, customers can implement storage-related aspects of their enterprise security architectures in the public cloud. ANF offers cloud flexibility and scalability through real-time provisioning of both performance and capacity allowing customers the ability to be agile while meeting their business needs in a cost-effective manner.

“Through our collaboration with Microsoft, we can deliver market-leading cloud storage and cloud infrastructure operations to our customers and partners that nobody else in the industry offers,” said Ronen Schwartz, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Cloud Storage, NetApp. “NetApp is offering a robust set of capabilities—with ANF, NetApp BlueXP’s hybrid data services, Cloud Volumes ONTAP, and Spot. We innovatein collaboration with Microsoft Azure, offering customers unparalleled optimization to both storage and compute. We accelerate the move to the cloud of general file and enterprise workloads, and increasingly help customers with cloud native workloads, Kubernetes and AI.”

In this phase, NetApp has made significant investments in its Spot by NetApp portfolio for CloudOps on Azure to bring new solutions to market. These include solutions to provide integrated support for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) environments and a fully managed, open-source solution that integrates with the existing ANF, NetApp BlueXP, and Cloud Volumes ONTAP services. Spot’s CloudOps solutions for Azure leverage AI/ML-driven automation to deliver continuous optimization of all Azure compute with increased efficiency and vastly reduced operational complexity, helping customers simplify and accelerate their Azure investments to maximize business value.

“Azure NetApp Files continues to deliver ever-greater innovation to our customers as a result of our long-standing and fruitful partnership with NetApp,” said Aung Oo, General Manager for Microsoft Azure Storage. “Together, Microsoft and NetApp provide customers an efficient way to optimize their Azure infrastructure, with Azure NetApp Files, a first-party storage service based on ONTAP, helping ensure they see maximum benefit from their investment with us.”

Together, NetApp and Microsoft have maintained a rapid pace of recent innovation,including:

Azure NetApp Files datastores for Azure VMware Solution
Application volume group for SAP HANA
Smaller 2TiB capacity pool size
Large volumes (Up to 500 TiB)
Customer-managed keys
Availability zone volume placement and cross-zone replication

New regions: South Africa North, Sweden Central, Qatar (Central), Korea South

Some recent portfolio innovations from Spot by NetApp for Azure users include:

Spot Eco support for Azure Savings Plans and all Azure account types includingPay-as-You-Go, multi-currency account (MCA), enterprise agreement (EA), and cloud solution provider (CSP)
Spot Elastigroup Stateful Node for Azure
Spot Security support for Azure
Spot Ocean for AKS enterprise-grade serverless engine for Azure
Spot Ocean for Apache Spark Azure support
Instaclustr Managed PostgreSQL on Azure NetApp Files

“The ability to deploy and operate applications with speed and reliability is critical forcompanies to succeed in the cloud,” said Haiyan Song, Executive Vice President and General Manager of CloudOps at NetApp. “Our expanded Spot by NetApp portfolio on Microsoft Azure and partnership with Microsoft provides customers with what they need to continuously automate and optimize application infrastructure in the cloud and drive the cloud operation and cost efficiency their businesses demand while delivering the digital experience customers expect.”

Spot by NetApp Cloud Ops solutions are available from Azure Marketplace, Microsoft Azure channel partners and NetApp directly. Azure NetApp Files is available through the Microsoft Azure portal as a native Azure service.