hello and welcome to unlock the power of your data with netapp and google cloud brought to you by netapp i'm your host katie bavoso from the channel company the cloud is often the platform of choice or at least the hottest topic when discussing modern storage solutions due to the creation of new technologies and remote access needs the cloud storage market is growing at a compound annual growth rate of nearly 22 percent and is expected to reach a value of 222.25billion dollars by 2027. netapp and google have the cloud solutions to meet your customers growing needs today i'm joined by jeff tudor senior director of hyperscaler cloud solutions at netapp and sean darrington senior product manager of google cloud at google welcome gentlemen we're going to begin with our first segment file storage in the cloud let's first address the different types of cloud storage block object and file sean why is file storage so important and who or what in particular is using it and why yeah hi katie thanks for having me it's great to be here um yeah file storage is actually one of the things that you know everybody's used to on-premises and it's been around for decades right and the difference is that between file and block storage which many people are familiar with object storage is kind of the new thing that grew up in the cloud initially and certainly there are solutions that uh we have object storage for on-premises but for most applications they can't access an object protocol to do what they need to do to run the business and so most applications actually rely on a file system smb or nfs the unstructured data all the home directories that we useon a daily basis but also a lot of applications that need a file system and block storage like sap so when you're looking at like why the cloud it's really about how companies are reimagining and re-architecting some of the applications to become moreefficient themselves and it might be more efficient just to run it in your own data center that's perfectly fine but a lot of organizations are embarking on a cloud-based journey and that means thinking about things differently how i've done it on-premises how i'm going to do it in the cloud and the more we can make it easy for people to move into the cloud like with file storage and have it be completely transparent to the applications the easier it is for them to adopt it so jeff going off of what sean said it's legacy file is still something so heavily used but what challenges do these businesses face when storing so much data in file well first katie thanks so much for uh for asking me to be here today and very pleased to work with my colleague sean when you look at fileit's been around for many years in fact about 27 years ago netapp started out bringing external file storage into the data center so we were there at the very beginning when you know basically there's so much file storage that was growing beyond just the capacity that was inside of the server they needed a separate landing zone for that and so we created network attached storage so that you could have your file storage in a separate place and then we created all this technologies just as snapshots and encryption and things like thatwould go on to it but when a customer looks at how they migrate the bulk of their data in the cloud first of all about eighty percent of the data in a data center is a file based uhis a file so there's two major kinds of uh protocols that they're going to need one is the windows or smb protocol the second is the linux or nfs protocol so they're going to need to make sure they have the right protocols that their applications will expect when they move to the cloud and that's something netapp has a lot of experience with uh second the thing they're gonna need to make sure it can have the data protection that it needs so things like instant snapshots that you can recover from axial deletions or god forbid crypto viruses and these types of things so there's a lot of things beyond just the protocol that will make an enterprise file storage successful for the workload sean back over to you how does google help these businesses who house their data on-prem and in file storage and what does netapp bring to the table to make this happen yeah it's a great question katie because you know as you just heard jeff mentioned you know netapp has been around for 27 years and they have tens of thousands of customers that are using their solution on premises and have satisfied a lot of those requirements that we've been speaking about already but now we've actually been able to partner together over the last few years and bring that same experience from on-premises into google cloud so now customers can transition applications as they need to um into the cloud with two different offerings that we have with netapp with cloud volume service which is a managed storage service so it has a file system protocols that jeff just mentioned smb and nfs but customers now don't have to manage they just choose how much storage they need and where they want it there's also cloud volumes on tap which is where customers can manage their own environment and it has all the same bells and whistles if you will of what they're used to managing on premises but now it's a very seamless experience of on-prem and migrating to the cloud or actually just doing a combination of both and keeping a hybrid model and so we've actually been working together very closely to make that easy for customers to move into the cloud and make that transition so that when companies are ready to modernize their applications they can do so or if they want to lift and optimize they can do that as well so it can lead to a lot of flexibility for partners to work with customers on where they are with their applications um like for example running sap uh in google cloud doesn't require a lot of changes from a customer's perspective other than consuming it in the cloud and that requires block and file and there are lots of technologies that make it very seamless to do from that on-prem into the cloud deployment let's continue on this topic of netapp and google working together in our second segment the netapp google partnership so sean you've also got question one here google is a household name for manyreasons it has thousands of engineers and resources so why does google choose to partner with netapp yeah it's a great question kate because you know one of the things that google does is we have a portfolio of products obviously from our ai and ml work capabilities that we're very well known for our infrastructure as a service our platform is as a service that gives companies the flexibility to run applications in either google compute environment or in their kubernetes environment but one of the things that we do also have a perspective of is an open ecosystem is that google can't satisfy all of our customer requirements and so that's where we look to netapp one of the leading providers of on-premises storage for the last 27 years as we mentioned in the first segment we want to leverage that experience with google and netapp to deliver more value to customers based upon the applications they need where they are in that application migration journey of doing a hybrid or full cloud migration jeff what do you netapp partners think of selling netapp in the google cloud ecosystem cloud is i like to say that cloud is not for um necessarily everything but it's for everyone and that basically tells you that you know no matter where your company is chances are they're going to move to the cloud for something and it's very important from a partner that might have a very you know established relationship with that customer for an on-prem workload to make sure they let that customer know that they can also um help them in their migration into the cloud no matter whatthat workload might be so the first thing is make sure you stay in to stay close with your customer and uh and what workloads you're looking at and second of if you're familiar with netapp and have the relate channel relationship with netapp we have platforms and methods for you to enjoy that relationship and the business relationship you have with your customer inside of google cloud so instead of perhaps selling them a 100 terabyte you know refresh for a filer on prim you can now sell a 100 terabyte cloud volume and get compensated for that so it's a great way for you to remain you know tight with that relationship with the customer and remain in the compensation loop for helping that customer and their journey and we have tons of partners that have done this successfully into google cloud some of our largest wins have been through channel partners and they're instrumental to us in how we can do proof of concepts trials we just had a verywell known household name that is a consumerin google in the financial services spaceum they really had a deadline coming up where they needed to exit the data center uh through our partner we were able to do a very quick poc that made them comfortable to make this big uh commit into google cloud the partner get paid the customer's happy google's happy it's a great 360 degree relationship so jeff what value does the netapp google relationship bring to netapp partners and how does it allow them to grow their businesses and increase their revenue well google has a great number of services in their portfolio and netapp has a you know great foundation of data fabric in fact that's the key value that we're bringing inside of google cloud is the netapp data fabric that's not only about storage but it's also about how you manage and protect that data and then do things like cross-region replication where a customer says hey i want to have my primary data center in u.s central one which would be iowa but i want to have data protection of that thousands of miles away in aspirin virginia in the east and so we can build things like that inside of storage so that the customer doesn't have to go manually create software to do that so there's a lot of technology that we're bringing to the table but how they can make you know basically more money and more success inside of google is building us into these applications such as windows file share migrations or sap migrations or backup and disaster recovery so we've built out use cases for each one of these solutions partnering with netapp inside of google cloud and then as your cell as your customers consuming uh the channel partner gets paid so it's uh it's a kind of a natural progression based upon the use case that the customer is looking at yeah and ale one other thing to that katie is that you know depending on where the partner is with that relationship with the customer about moving storage workloads or moving applications there's a flexibility within google cloud to actually run them on some of the leading vms uh either gce or gke platforms uh we actually just recently announced this month in february the amd epic processor right so codename milan we do a lot of work with nvidia for having very high density gpus for vms so depending upon the types of applications where those their customers are in this migrationthey can run lots of different application workloads based upon the vm type gpu tpu etc and have file storage uh sitting right behind that so again it gives them a lot of flexibility to leverage the capabilities of the cloud with the capabilities of storage well now that we know why this partnership bolsters your partner's success and grows their opportunities let's talk about how partners can get the most out of the netapp google ecosystems in our third and final segment the migration journey sean how should channel providers approach netapp and google cloud and how can they relay this to their customers to best start them on their cloud journeys i think the first step katie is for the partner to have a conversation with a customer like what are the business priorities for the customer not only for this quarter or this budget cycle but many times customers will have a one to three to five year plan for that jeff mentioned earlier thefinancial services company that had a data center exit strategy right that's one of the things that a lot of companies want to get out of is the facilities business they want to get out of the data center business and that can lead to a conversation that would involve a plan for moving applications over time or maybe sooner rather than later into the cloud i think that's also one of the things for the partners once you have that conversation with customers to reach out to google reach out to netapp whoever you have the relationship first with uh to begin that conversation because the two of us that up in google we have a very close selling relationship so regardless of who you reach out to you're going to have a unified response and oftentimes a joint selling effort if you will to be able to convey that value of what we can deliver to the customer based upon their requirements and their timing so let's actually bring this into some real world examples jeff can you give me an example or use case of what shawn and i just talked about yeah we have um you know one of the things that we're very aligned with google on is windows file share because for this smb protocol that we discussed um we are google's partner for delivering that and you know it sounds kind of like oh it's a protocol wellif you have customers with petabytes of data chances are a lot of them will have windows file shares in that and that's things such as you know restricting access for file permissions to particular active directory groups that's very key to infosec and security so you know wecan certainly support that and i'll give you an example of one where we had a great channel partner um uh involved in this we did a campaign around windows file shares um kind of just a as a legion and we got an opportunity um and worked on it with a partner and this is amedia company that has using netapp storage inside of google cloud to develop real-time media for distribution and multi-channel world whether it's in social media digital and print and so they're using virtual windows virtual desktops hosted inside of google cloud connecting to netapp storage and they have public they have their creators and editors from around the world that are coming into the um in the cloud todo their to do the journalism since they can't get together in offices uh so that was a great one that uh was you know from one end of the spectrum in the median entertainment space uh but we also have others in the media entertainment space like music publishing uh to big retailproviders that are looking to migrate their entire operations and are using us with uh vmware uh so yeah there's a lot of different type of use cases around it but we've worked very productively and proactively with our partners as we do lead generation we will land in uh with customers and so we have a partner program that we're investing very aggressively in we want to do more of our deals with partners in cloud netapp's a very partner first company you know we have 70 over 70 percent of our deals are landed through the channel and now we're making we're doubling down on thatstrategy inside of the cloud so yeah you know we have dedicated google sales teams to work with our channel partners uh to get going and to make their lives easier and the chance of success um more in a faster rate right so getting more deals done faster at a higher margin with um with a channel program that compensates themso jeff enterprises have been very focused on backup and disaster recovery for on-prem deployments especially in this current environment where do these concerns fit into the conversation when partners are considering netapp and google cloud well you know there's just numbers were just released that in the first half of 2021 over 600 million dollars were paid for ransomware payments and you know that top number one is retail and consumer goods then you have your financial manufacturing and government health care i mean these it's frightening to see what's going on out there so if the channel partner has a practice around helping customers with proactive plans to mitigate against these disasters that's just one example of how we can work together we have sales plays around that but thisbasically is saying if you're moving your file systems into the cloud netapp has a host of technologies that protects that data right so if for instance anything gets in and starts overwriting files you can recover instantly from snapshots you can protect those snapshots into immutable object storage uh with something we call snap lock so there's a lot of things that netapp has that can protect that in the kind of disaster recovery from the ransomware but just like i said earlier you also have multi-zonal have multi-zonal have multi-zonal or multi-regional availability for your file system so if for you have a natural disaster in the central you can recover it in the eastern region right so you have a lot of capabilities in the disaster recovery and backing up into object storage doing cross region uh replication and um and server for data prevention and survival thatwe can bring together so we have a whole host of solutions and we can bring that with you into gcp yeah jeff you know another good example of this is actually a win that we had at a healthcare company andsomething as simple as file serving the partners as you have those conversations can be really small or can be really big and beneficial to the customer so this customer had 80 different locations they had filers netapp filers at each of the different 80 locations a long time netapp customer but they've got petabytes of data they were backing that data up and they were having to manage it but now we were actually able to go in with a conversation an architecture and a value proposition it says keep your netapp move it in the cloud and now you can simplify operations you can actually remove the netapp filers from the 80 different locations centralize that in a region and do a cross-region backup of that data so now you're able to protect against ransomware able to satisfy the backup and recovery retentions from a regulatory perspective and they're able to simplify operations they no longer have to touch physical filers at those locations their users don't know that anything has changed they're still accessing local smb shares as they have been but now they're able to reduce their capital expense they're able to transition it to operations operational expense but yet they consistently manage what they have been doing over time for many years now it's just in the cloud so sean companies aren't just looking and thinking about modernizing their storage for today they definitely want something that they can adapt and update for future needs how do netapp and the google cloud platform address this need first is you have to have the platform to run whatever applications right and i mentioned before about the different uh instance types we have with what we announced with amd and the epic code name milan processor in that family so depending on what the applications are we have the platform to run either andgce google's compute engine or google's kubernetes engines gke and then from there it's really just a function of where the customers are for their applications right and where they want to modernize where they want to start maybe simply with the file sharing examples that we talked about keeping data protection the same way they have on premises or they want to start to modernize those and refactor them to run on more serverless architectures if you will so it really just depends upon where the customer is in their journey but knowing that this is something that netapp and google can work with your partner and your customers to be able to start where you need to and over time get to the endpoint jeff let's start with you on this one where can partners and potential partners learn more well first of all reach out to your netapp channel manager or go to netapp.com and you can kind of contact if you don't have one already of course we have our traditional partner program and we have a cloud component to it so if you're not already a cloud partner please reach out to that channel manager ask for more information around the cloud partnership we have training resources dedicated channel managers for each one of the hyperscalersso you can make sure that you're getting the right content for your customer for google cloud and then we also of course have compensation programs so that as you're selling the cloud volume service or cloud volumes ontap and gcp you're getting uh compensation for that so just because your customers data center moves to the cloud doesn't mean you can't move your revenue stream with them right you're providing value to your customer you're taking your we keep you abreast of the newer technologies so you can get those to them do trials do proof of concepts get early access and it's not just about storage and google cloud we just uh announced um our new cloud data sense program so that gives you the additional ability to peer into that storage and look for any personal identifiable information pri credit card information these types of things that can cause compliance risk so that's new we also have astra project astra for the kubernetes as sean was mentioning the gke so it's not just this cloud volume service and cloud volume zone tap we also have other services that are launching into google and we can help you drive your customer into there so whether it's just a lift and shift for an existing application or whether it's a application rewrite and modernization netapp really provides a fundamental value for data protection in those cases and we provide a good revenue stream in addition to google's partner program so that you can really double down in their customers cloud journey and profit from that jeff sean thank you both so much for your time today and thank you at home for watching and listening once again i'm katie pavonso and i'll see you next time