Running NetApp and VMware? It’s time to get ready for cloud.

According to an IDC Survey Spotlight article, only 2% of large enterprises have moved their data-intensive VMware workloads to the cloud. If your organization is among the tens of thousands of VMware customers still running on premises, then you’re probably aware of the challenges of moving these workloads to the cloud. You know that migration can be expensive, inefficient, and complex.

But the world is moving to the cloud. The benefits are just too enticing to ignore: agility, speed to market, operational efficiency, and the freedom to focus on innovation, not on managing hardware.

I’m reminded of the early days of virtualization when organizations virtualized their environments workload by workload. We couldn’t just rush out and virtualize everything all at once—we had to wait for virtual machines to mature. We needed more functionality and higher performance. I remember having to prove that you could run Oracle on a virtual server without crushing performance.

The cloud has gone through the same maturity curve. Organizations began their cloud journeys by migrating mostly unstructured data while waiting for the cloud to mature before migrating their mission-critical applications. But that day has come.

In fact, VMware has placed big bets on their future in the cloud by partnering with the three major public cloud providers to enable customers to run VMware in the cloud as a first-party service. With new VMware solutions, such as VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services (VMC), Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE), and Azure VMware Service (AVS), customers can easily move their VMware workloads to the public cloud provider of their choice.

This is the same thing we did with NetApp® ONTAP® back in 2014 when we began building our data fabric with products like Cloud Volumes ONTAP, Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud, Azure NetApp Files, and, more recently, Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP. Our goal was to make sure that if a customer was used to enterprise-class data management on their premises, they could get enterprise-class data management in the cloud with compression, deduplication, compaction, Snapshot™ copies, replication, and built-in VMware data protection—all the value that ONTAP provides.

With vSphere, VMware has made it so that the quickest and easiest path to migrating VMware workloads to the cloud is to keep them on VMware. You don’t have to, of course. You could always refactor your applications to run on the cloud-native virtualization layer in your hyperscaler of choice. But that means rewriting the apps, which could take years to do and cost thousands of dollars per VM. Why do that if you don't have to?

The trouble is that moving VMware workloads to the cloud is not as easy as just moving to VMC, GCVE, or AVS. Although it’s faster and less expensive than refactoring applications for the cloud, it still requires new investment. And you still need enterprise-grade storage and data management for these critical, data-intensive workloads. That's where NetApp comes in.

Together, NetApp and VMware have partnered to make the cloud a viable, economical option for your data-intensive VMware solutions. Not only can we reduce the cost of running your VMware solutions in the cloud by 25% to 50%, we also bring all our enterprise-class storage capabilities to the cloud. And we've done the engineering work with VMware to make it integrated, so you can connect supplemental cloud storage services to build a well-running VMware cloud or VMware hybrid cloud environment.

So whether your organization is moving to the cloud now or plans to get there eventually, now is the time to modernize your infrastructure to set yourself up for success. How? If you’re already on NetApp, congratulations, we’ve made it easy because you’re running NetApp ONTAP.

If you’re new to NetApp and you’re moving to the cloud, we can help you to future proof your infrastructure by making your on-premises architecture the same as it will be in the cloud. Having a consistent architecture between your on-premises data center and the cloud makes replication easy, giving you freedom of choice and the flexibility to move your workloads across a hybrid multicloud environment. NetApp storage efficiency technologies offer immediate cost savings, while operational consistency reduces complexity and management overhead.