The Power of partnerships: Taking multicloud mainstream

Nearly every CIO today is embroiled in a journey to the cloud, continually seeking to find the right balance of which workloads to move, which cloud vendors to use, and which technologies deliver the highest value to the business at lowest cost.

A key requirement we consistently hear from customers is the desire to have trusted enterprise-class data services that have been used and vetted on premises for decades, seamlessly available in the public cloud, regardless of a cloud provider.

This is easier said than done, however. According to IDC, even though 80% of organizations run hybrid multicloud environments already, they cite challenges such as lack of integration, management complexities, lack of end‐to‐end visibility, limited skills, and spiraling costs of operations.

To solve these challenges, customers today tend to sift through a lot of vendor marketing claims and online resources. They’re trying to identify where industry leaders are meaningfully investing to meet their needs today while providing a platform with longevity to meet the demands of tomorrow.

Industry leaders can meet these needs and demands only with a unique combination of global customer experience, integrated cloud services, and meaningful joint technology investment.

Global customer experience: Understanding workload demands

VMware and NetApp have been partnering to simplify the design and operation of virtualized infrastructure and data management for nearly 20 years. Over 19,000 joint customers have provided a global wealth of experience, allowing us to understand how to optimize the balance of performance, cost, and data services based on each customer’s unique workloads.

Decades of joint development and customer deployments by VMware and NetApp give us a deep understanding of what types of functionality and data services customers would seek in the public cloud, and how to enable them.

Integrated cloud services: Certified and supported as one

Taking decades of technology innovation and making it available in the public cloud is no trivial task. Both VMware and NetApp have spent years developing managed service offerings for our respective virtualization and data management platforms that are offered as native services across the leading hyperscalers:

• AWS: VMware Cloud on AWS and Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP
• Microsoft Azure: Azure VMware Solution and Azure NetApp Files
• Google Cloud: Google Cloud VMware Engine and NetApp^® Cloud Volumes Service

These services combine the cost savings and efficiencies of the public cloud with the benefits of VMware’s and NetApp’s mature workload and data management technologies that are widely deployed on premises today.

Data-intensive workloads drive new demands

VMware Cloud has been proven to deliver over 350% return on investment for customers that are moving workloads to the public cloud, including:

• 46% faster migration
• 57% lower migration costs
• 39% lower infrastructure costs

However, because more data-intensive workloads are now being migrated, customers are seeking new levels of flexibility that allow them to purchase and scale storage on demand, without having to purchase additional compute capacity.

To address this need, VMware and NetApp are working with all major public cloud providers to enable use of industry-leading NetApp ONTAP^® storage software as the first integrated, validated, and supported shared NFS datastore for VMware Cloud offerings.

Joint technology investment: VMware, NetApp, and public cloud providers

Enabling a seamless hybrid and multicloud experience for any workload in any location requires deep, ongoing investment from committed partners.

VMware and NetApp, through our partnerships with leading public cloud providers, give you the freedom to move even data-intensive workloads to the cloud of your choice, while reducing and controlling costs and maintaining operational consistency.

Through new levels of industry-first joint development, we’re enabling the use of NetApp cloud services as a supplemental datastore certified and supported with VMware Cloud Services across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. This new level of integration allows IT to map the right cloud compute node types and cloud storage services to their workloads in flexible combinations to meet their needs. This mapping can reduce the total cost of running VMware Cloud solutions by up to 25% ­to 50%—or more, in most cases.

Here's an example of the economic impact that this new integration can have for your workloads. Suppose that, like many of our customers, you want to take advantage of the public cloud to simplify and accelerate development of new applications.

By using Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP as a supplemental datastore to VMware Cloud on AWS, you can align your cloud compute to your workload needs, purchasing fewer nodes. Then you can supplement your cloud storage capacity needs with FSx for ONTAP, resulting in a lower total cost of the overall solution.

This shared cloud storage resource can also be expanded to use for migration or protection of a variety of workloads (NFS, SMB, and/or iSCSI block) with common management, streamlining what could otherwise be a complex management scenario.

Multicloud is now a reality and growing fast

Demand for cloud services is skyrocketing and is here to stay, with more IT budgets now being allocated to cloud than to enterprise data centers.

Although cloud migrations started with the “easier” applications, many of you are now looking to move your more complex, business-critical workloads to the cloud. You’re seeking out solutions from vendors who are providing the right combination of global customer experience, integrated cloud services, and meaningful partnerships needed to enable a future-proof journey to the cloud. And NetApp and VMware are committed to delivering on this for our joint customers.

To learn more, visit the VMware Cloud on AWS page.

This blog was co-written by Ronen Schwartz, senior vice president and general manager of Cloud Volumes at NetApp, and Narayan Bharadwaj, vice president, VMware Cloud Solutions.