Kyndryl’s NetApp customer story

You need to trust your infrastructure partners when you’re the world's largest IT services provider. For more than 15 years, Kyndryl and NetApp have been delivering best-in-industry data management and storage infrastructure solutions for the world’s leading cloud providers. Together, they help enterprises modernize and simplify complex workloads.

Kyndryl, which spun off from IBM’s Global Technology Services business in 2021, designs, builds, manages, and modernizes the world's critical technology systems. The company is headquartered in New York but serves thousands of enterprise customers in over 60 countries.

“NetApp’s strategic partnership with Kyndryl enables joint delivery of critical data infrastructure services that will accelerate future innovation and business impact for customers and fast track cloud adoption,” said George Kurian, CEO of NetApp.

From cloud migrations to transformative infrastructure modernization projects, Kyndryl and NetApp have been delivering innovative services to organizations faced with complex enterprise challenges.

“The combination of our respective expertise and technology leadership will enable companies in all industries to transition more and more of their critical applications to the cloud, while driving valuable insights from their unstructured data across IT modernization,” said Elly Keinan, Group President, at Kyndryl.

Most recently, the two companies have been working on new ways for customers to simplify their projects while taking advantage of new technology.

“One of the issues we have with our clients is they know what their end vision is, but they don't know how to get there,” said Megg Bailey, storage architect at Kyndryl. “And we also can't disrupt their current business.”

To help companies better organize, manage, and reap insights through enhanced data management, Kyndryl and NetApp provide new hybrid cloud solutions and services tailored and tuned to address industry-specific challenges.

Kyndryl and NetApp have designed advanced storage infrastructure-as-a-service solutions to provide customers with greater flexibility, versatility, and value from using unstructured information and help companies derive business value from their data.

The partnership helps keep vital infrastructures of the world’s leading companies operating in critical industries.

“We have over 1,000 different NetApp clusters and hundreds and hundreds of petabytes that we manage across the globe,” Bailey said.

But it’s not just the scale that’s important, Bailey said. It’s the flexibility and impact.

“One of the reasons we love working with NetApp is they have a wide variety of tools and solutions – things like StorageGrid and Cloud Volumes ONTAP – that are easy entries into the cloud,” Bailey said. “So NetApp gives us a lot of options to find the right solutions for our clients.”

Whatever the specific solution, the result often involves modernization, which leads to better efficiency and lower costs.

“We have a large multinational corporation that does manufacturing,” Bailey said. “They were on some older hardware from another vendor. We wanted to migrate them to NetApp, and it was a very complicated migration. Professional services came in and helped us do that. It was over 60PB that we were able to successfully migrate. This is where NetApp is so helpful.”

Companies like these need real-time insights into their manufacturing processes to tackle complexity and prioritize investments.

AI integration has been part of Kyndryl’s services for some time, but the company is continues operationalizing its benefits.

“Kyndryl is working on something called AIOps where we are using AI to do observational monitoring,” Bailey said. “Our next goal is we're going to tune that to do preventative measures. And NetApp actually works with that really well. We're working together with all of our data to make sure that we can be as good for our clients as possible and give them the best preventative solutions.”

The solutions will help modernize delivery with automation and AI, freeing up Kyndryl experts to unlock more innovation for customers. Customers will benefit from increased systems availability and reduced downtime.