Editor’s Note: Phil Brotherton is Vice President, Cloud Services Group at NetApp. This is the first in a series of articles written by the participants on Verizon’s Enterprise Cloud Ecosystem panel at Interop Las Vegas on April 2, 2014 at 4pm.
You’d have to live under a rock to miss that data control is emerging as a defining issue of our time. Recent news is loaded with conversation around the value of data protection. There are the breaches we’ve all heard about, but there’s also the eye-popping valuations of data privacy oriented startups. What’s clear is that the value of data control just keeps increasing and there’s no end in sight. So when I speak to CIOs about the exciting opportunities the cloud can deliver, it’s always with the understanding that, regardless of the computing destination, the ownership, control and stewardship of the organization’s data still resides with IT leadership.
It’s a fact that new multi-cloud architectures that connect SaaS, IaaS and PaaS platforms with the enterprise make data governance more complex because data is more distributed. It’s also true that while industry shifting rewards around agility and cost saving will lure us all forward, managing hybrid architectures is still an emerging area and the stakes around losing data control are high. So, picking the right partners to make the journey to hybrid cloud is a huge deal, on par with choosing an enterprise application architecture and operations framework. Those that dabble or partner organically do so at their peril. With the right combination of experience, technology and ecosystem, NetApp is well positioned to be a strategic partner for enterprises as they seek to solve data management challenges in hybrid cloud environments.
NetApp has deep experience in meeting the data security, availability and protection needs of hundreds of thousands of enterprise customers on-premise and in-the-cloud services they seek to consume. And our vision is to extend our flagship operating system, clustered Data ONTAP, to create a hybrid cloud data management solution that spans the data storage landscape, irrespective of data type or location. This enterprise-controlled cloud data fabric will exploit efficient data movement, container portability, and security technology, making it easy to move data between internal and external Data ONTAP clouds. With it, CIOs will be able to get where they want to go with hybrid cloud without compromising data control.
Of course data stewardship challenges across a cloud data fabric exceed what any one company can deliver alone. Therefore, we take great care in choosing our ecosystem of cloud service provider partners. We collaborate deeply with a small set of innovative cloud providers that share our values and enterprise experience so that we can deliver hybrid solutions our customers can use. Verizon is a great example of this type of enterprise-focused service provider. Together we’ve helped large enterprises and government agencies integrate cloud solutions to make their operations run faster and more efficiently without sacrificing data control.
And we’ll help even more as we collaborate to bring enterprise data management and performance to public cloud infrastructure in Verizon's next generation enterprise cloud. Verizon will be one of the first implementations of clustered Data ONTAP deployed as a virtual storage appliance giving enterprise-grade features on a low-cost, Web-scale infrastructure. Customers will be able to reserve performance, while paying only for the IOPS, storage and bandwidth needed. And, like all Data ONTAP based clouds, the new Verizon Cloud will connect to the ONTAP cloud data fabric using the same data movement and portability technologies that move data seamlessly between remote physical NetApp storage devices.
So, as business needs continue to propel enterprises toward hybrid cloud take a hard look at strategically collaborating with vendors and cloud providers that approach the problem with enterprise credibility and the capability and vision for helping you manage through data stewardship challenges to reap the rewards. And, don’t forget to ask how their key ecosystem partners contribute because they surely can’t do it alone. Finally, if you happen to be at Interop and want to chat further please stop by session “The Enterprise Cloud Ecosystem” where Verizon’s John Considine, executives from Oracle, Cloudera, and I would love to continue the discussion! The session will take place on Wednesday, April 2 from 4 – 4:50 pm in Mandalay Bay Meeting Room “I.”
