Data storage provider NetApp Inc. said today at its NetApp Insight virtual conference that it’s launching a number of new services to simplify and optimize multicloud management for data-rich software applications and help companies better manage the transition to remote work.

The most important of the new services is Spot Storage, which the company described as a “serverless and storageless” solution for software containers that host the components of modern applications that can run anywhere.

The service is meant to be combined with its existing Spot Ocean offering that automates cloud infrastructure for containers. Together, they help companies to build, deploy and run microservices-based apps on Kubernetes without needing to worry about providing storage and data services for them.

This is a compelling offering, NetApp said, because the speed and agility of cloud-based container applications is offset to a large extent by new challenges around managing availability, capacity, performance and cost of the cloud environments they run in. “Solving for these requirements creates a significant burden on cloud infrastructure and operations teams, but not doing so results in wasted cloud resources, fragile infrastructure, and difficulties meeting SLAs,” the company said in a blog post.

Spot Storage solves these challenges by automatically optimizing the underlying storage infrastructure through real-time monitoring and advanced analytics. It works by determining and then deploying the ideal mix of storage resources to ensure each application can access the data it needs quickly enough, while minimizing costs at the same time by leveraging the optimal pricing model from each storage provider.

NetApp compares “storageless” to “serverless” infrastructure. With serverless, developers can just deploy their apps and they’ll run on the most optimal infrastructure to meet their availability and scale requirements. Storageless does much the same thing, only it takes care of the storage considerations. Modern applications gain more agility and have a lower total cost of ownership, NetApp said, while developers get more time to focus on developing products that can scale alongside their applications.

“Storageless allows teams to build and run applications without architecting persistent size and shape, including throughput, maintenance and capacity provisioning,” the company said. “Volumes as a Service are made available for nearly any type of application or backend service with everything required to run and scale applications with high availability.”

Also new today is a related offering called NetApp Cloud Manager that serves as an autonomous cloud volume platform for managing hybrid and multicloud data services. NetApp Cloud Manager provides admins with full visibility and simplified controls for data sync, data backup, data tiering, file caching and compliance services, no matter if the storage is hosted on-premises or in the public cloud.

Analyst Steve McDowell of Moor Insights & Strategy told SiliconANGLE that NetApp understands that the container data model isn’t suitable for traditional storage, so it needs to adapt its offerings to accommodate this evolution. He said pure-play storage firms are attempting to do this by abstracting down and removing the tight coupling between the underlying storage and the data management layer within Kubernetes.

“This is absolutely the right approach to take, and really the only viable one for the storage guys,” McDowell said.

He said it’s still too early to tell if NetApp has cracked the nut. The whole area of container storage is ripe with innovation, he said, and there are no dominant players yet. Even so, he said NetApp’s moves are definitely ambitious. Today’s announcements suggest it doesn’t just want to solve container storage but the much broader container orchestration problem, which puts it on a crash course with companies like VMware Inc. and IBM Corp.

“NetApp’s moves are positive,” McDowell said. “We’re seeing renewed focus and energy from the this company under its new leadership. This is not a company anymore that is afraid to disrupt itself. NetApp will remain in the conversation and a strong player in the enterprise.”

Finally, NetApp announced a new cloud-hosted Virtual Desktop Management Service that it said will help companies scale infrastructure resources to meet the demands of their growing remote workforces. With this, NetApp is providing a single portal for companies to handle remote desktop deployments across public and private cloud environments. It works by automating and orchestrating many of the remote desktop services that must otherwise be enabled manually, such as setting up SMB file shares, enabling certain Windows features, application installations, firewalls and so on.

Today’s updates further the evolution of NetApp. The company made its name as a provider of data storage hardware, but with that business under intense pressure from public cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services Inc., it has in recent years pivoted more towards software and services. These days, NetApp follows a “cloud-first” strategy that enables its customers to access their data wherever it lives, as if it were hosted on a local file system.

“To thrive in the new normal, digital transformation has become a business imperative,” said NetApp Chief Executive George Kurian (pictured). “To succeed, businesses need to optimize their hybrid multicloud IT architectures.”

NetApp’s new data services launch a week after the company announced some big updates to its cloud-based data management software.

Photo: SiliconANGLE