A strategy of continuously leaning into trends that otherwise would have ended its way of doing business is what allowed data management company NetApp Inc. to remain at the forefront of enterprise computing technology for 25 years, according to NetApp Founder and Executive Vice President David Hitz (pictured, left). It started with supporting virtualization and now extends into the cloud paradigm, where NetApp aims to strengthen otherwise competitive technologies.

“We were like, you know what, let’s go figure out how to make Amazon better, make Microsoft better. If we can make them better, if you solve a hard problem for a customer, some way or another you can figure out how to get paid for that,” Hitz said.

Hitz and Anthony Lye (pictured, right),  senior vice president and general manager of the Cloud Business Unit at NetApp, spoke with host John Furrier (@furrier) and guest host Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor) on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio during the NetApp Insight event in Las Vegas, Nevada. They talked about how NetApp is leaning into the cloud movement with its Data Fabric offerings. (* Disclosure below.)

Data Fabric in the cloud

Central to NetApp’s cloud strategy is its Data Fabric-branded series of data services that can be consumed as APIs that can be orchestrated and connected to provide meaningful solutions. For example, its ONTAP storage operating system extends into the cloud for easy data storage management.

“You can buy ONTAP Cloud for AWS, and you can buy it for Azure, and so you can establish a cluster on one and connect it to a cluster on a different one and let ONTAP snap between the two,” Lye said.

Hitz went on to explain another use case where the company’s Data Fabric solutions are blurring the lines between on-premises security and cloud functionality. A bucket of facial image data stored locally was connected with Amazon’s facial recognition service in the cloud, and a simple routine was created to generate metadata on the facial expressions without the data ever leaving the premises.  

“We have integrated our StorageGRID object storage with Amazon Simple Notification Service. … Is that cloud, or is that on-prem? We used Amazon’s Lambda; this is Data Fabric,” Hitz concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of NetApp Insight US 2017. (* Disclosure: NetApp Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither NetApp nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE