Kristina Brand and Lisa Crewe of NetApp Solutions Marketing stopped by the Wikibon headquarters to share their insights into virtualization, automation and the software-defined data center with co-founder Dave Vellante.

Brand highlights that NetApp’s virtualization strategy has evolved both organically and through acquisitions. She adds that her company’s OnCommand portfolio is helping enterprises address the growing complexity of their virtualized environments.

In Brand’s view, the rapid adoption of cloud computing and software-led infrastructure is pushing IT organizations to the limit from an administration standpoint. She believes that automation is the answer to their woes.

“Automation is critical to bring organizations forward in being able to successfully deploy their cloud services and move to what we call the software-defined data center,” Brand said. “We need something that’s gonna scale for this kind of growth. The second thing is openness: we need to make sure that whatever we have today, whether we want to maintain some legacy management software, homegrown scripts, etc., we want to work with what we have in place today as we look to introduce new tools as well.”

According to Brand, OnCommand automates workflows and abstracts storage to simplify the IT stack. Crewe chimes in with a full overview of the OnCommand portfolio.

Crewe details that OnCommand Workflow Automation accelerates provisioning, while System Manager enables admins to monitor and configure individual hardware devices. Unified Manager is a higher level solution that provides performance analysis across large environments. These four solutions are available for free with NetApp storage purchases, Crew notes. Customers only have to pay extra for the Cognos-based Report and Insight tools.

Asked to elaborate on the benefits of OnCommand, Brand says that the suite has recently helped a software vendor in the financial service provider streamline its test and dev workloads and accelerate time to market.

See the video below for the full discussion, including the NetApp perspective on services and automated machine data analytics.