Making it look easy, NetApp and Google Cloud simplify digital transformation
Anuj Kumar
They say you should embrace change. If that’s true, then we’ve been doing a lot of hugging.
NetApp and Google Cloud have been working hard to help companies adapt to change. Capitalize on uncertainty. Shape new business opportunities. Specifically, we’ve created a powerful cloud toolkit to help solve and simplify tough business challenges. Like migrating complex enterprise workloads to the cloud and tackling complex analytics and data management puzzles. We’ve built flexible, robust cloud storage infrastructure that redefines performance and ease of use—at the lowest possible cost.
These achievements are only the beginning. Over 500 NetApp customers have chosen Google Cloud to move forward. They’re implementing cloud solutions in creative new ways, as we continue to advance what’s possible.
How customers are benefiting from this partnership
The partnership of NetApp and Google Cloud has always been focused on easing migration to the cloud and helping you get the most value from your data while lowering IT costs. We’ve known from the start that our complementary strengths could benefit our customers. When you combine Google Cloud’s robust infrastructure and rich analytics with NetApp® enterprise-class data management services, you get co-engineered, advanced services that help fulfill the promise of cloud—faster and more easily—for even the most complex enterprise apps.“Our joint mission is to help customers realize the promise of the public cloud and enable them to drive digital transformation at the pace required to adapt and perform in real time,” said Manvinder Singh, director of Partnerships at Google Cloud. “With NetApp’s innovative enterprise data services tightly integrated into Google Cloud, organizations can immediately take advantage of Google Cloud’s leadership in infrastructure and application modernization, smart analytics, and machine learning to support the most demanding workloads and drive innovation.”
Moving to the cloud shouldn’t affect enterprise performance or introduce new risk. In fact, many of our customers are finding that migrating business-critical workloads to the cloud is less stressful than they thought:
- MailerLite, an email marketing company in Europe, recently migrated more than 100 million files to Google Cloud—and is now running an extensive NFS file system in the cloud. The best part? In about an hour, they had all their files safe in Google Cloud, putting an end to the availability, management, and maintenance issues they had experienced in the past.
- Dexcom, a leader in diabetes care technology, struggled with collaboration across distributed locations. Now they have a highly reliable and available cloud-native artifact management system that synchronizes across multiple regions, with minimal downtime for maintenance.
Whether you want to migrate or modernize your enterprise applications and data, we’ll meet you where you are. And if you’re wondering what cloud project to tackle first, we’ve noticed some patterns. You would think the “easy” projects should take precedence, but that isn’t always the case. Market drivers, outside forces, or competitive pressures can rearrange timelines.
Flex your Windows
There’s an irony with Windows file shares. They make up over half of the workloads running in the cloud, but they can be surprisingly difficult to manage. For example, SMB workloads sometimes struggle with availability, scalable performance, and dynamic capacity. But there’s good news. NetApp Cloud Volumes Service provides highly scalable, dynamic performance and capacity utilization for SMB and NFS file shares.You can deploy Cloud Volumes as a fully managed storage service or as a self-managed storage layer on Google Cloud. Whatever deployment model you pick, NetApp gets your NFS and Windows file shares where they should be, more quickly and for less cost. How much less? Well, you can shrink your infrastructure costs by up to 70%.
So, we have you covered if you want to rehost Windows Server instances with SMB protocol support to accelerate migration, consolidate distributed file servers, and modernize digital workspaces.
Enhance the power of virtual desktops
Another area of focus for us has been NetApp Virtual Desktop Service (VDS). VDS is cloud-native automation and orchestration that enables desktop as a service (DaaS) on Google Cloud. The future of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is delivering desktops in the cloud.Here’s why it’s important. Businesses continue to reshape their working environments from traditional desktops to cloud-driven virtual desktops. By integrating virtual desktop solutions into the private cloud, public cloud, or hybrid environment, they've seen more cost-efficient operations and have been able to flexibly support desktops and software access regardless of where their workers are physically located.
Enter NetApp VDS with Google Cloud. VDS supports Remote Desktop Services (RDS) on Google Cloud as well as on-premises environments, which makes virtual desktop provisioning and automation easy. With VDS, businesses anywhere in the world can deploy a validated solution that eliminates the challenges and inefficiencies of managing legacy virtual desktop solutions. Read about how Swizznet uses NetApp VDS on Google Cloud to keep applications available anytime, anywhere.
Innovate for the future
With NetApp and Google Cloud, you get the performance you need to move, deploy, and manage business-critical data and applications in the cloud with minimal changes, fewer resources, and the lowest risk. But we aren’t stopping there. In the future, we’ll have a broader set of solutions for multicloud and hybrid cloud, including Google Cloud’s Anthos, enabling you to run Kubernetes anywhere. When you work with NetApp and Google Cloud, you’ll have all this and more at your fingertips.- Serious data management and analytics. As you consider moving workloads or deploying new enterprise applications to the cloud, you need a storage environment that delivers high data availability and durability. With NetApp Cloud Volumes Service (fully managed) or NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP® (self-managed), you get the most comprehensive set of storage management capabilities for enterprise applications available on Google Cloud.
- Multi-protocol support
- High availability
- Automated, rapid backup and recovery
- Zero trust–based data protection
- Automated controls for data privacy compliance
- Optimized data movement and tiering
- Hybrid cloud infrastructure analytics
- Global VDI and RDS orchestration
- Real-time global file sharing
- Container-native solutions. With NetApp Cloud Volumes Service and Google Kubernetes Engine, you can build, deploy, manage, and run containerized applications. Cloud Volumes Service provides fast, reliable, and persistent storage for your stateful applications that run on Kubernetes. And Cloud Volumes ONTAP provides Kubernetes multicloud management for persistent storage requirements of containerized workloads. For example, using NFS for shared storage can be an attractive option, because it can be easier to manage and more flexible than other storage formats. NetApp Trident and Cloud Volumes ONTAP make it easier to deploy and manage NFS for Kubernetes clusters in the cloud.
- Hybrid cloud solutions: The best of both worlds. Many organizations choose to build a hybrid cloud that spans on-premises and cloud infrastructure to enable portability across environments. The advantage of this approach is that it lets you continue to use existing data center tools and skillsets as you start working on Google Cloud. Here are some of the common use cases for hybrid cloud:
- Replicating data from on-premises to Google Cloud for disaster recovery, backup, and archiving. This replication frees space in the data center and adds geo-distributed data protection.
- Bursting on-premises datasets to Google Cloud by using remote caching for time-limited, compute-intensive jobs such as electronic design automation, visual effects rendering, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and big data analytics.
- Cloning multiple lightweight copies of on-premises production data on Google Cloud for creating parallel development, test, staging, user acceptance testing, and demo environments.
You can extend NetApp on-premises ONTAP systems to Google Cloud by using Cloud Volumes ONTAP, which lets you do seamless mirroring, cloning, caching, and migration of data between on-premises environments and Google Cloud.
As you can see, Google Cloud and NetApp are committed to ensuring that you have the technologies you need to drive digital transformation. As the world becomes more complex, the insights you gain from your data need to arrive more quickly and easily. NetApp and Google Cloud are working at a blistering pace to continue to give you the tools you need to simplify your cloud journey—and get the most value out of your data. We’ve built an impressive foundation that will help you adapt and shift to market conditions, migrate and modernize apps, and reduce cost.
Ready to see what’s possible in Google Cloud?
Start a risk-free trial of one of our data management tools today:Or, if you’re ready to talk, we’re here to help.
