NetApp Inc. said today it’s updating its ONTAP data management software with new capabilities and features that it says will centralize and simplify data administration across hybrid cloud environments.

The company also announced updates to some of its key products powered by ONTAP, including its FlexPod converged infrastructure and its highly scalable object store, called StorageGRID.

NetApp has traditionally been a seller of data storage hardware, but with that business under intense pressure from public cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services Inc., it has been putting more focus on its data management software in recent years. These days, NetApp follows a “cloud-first” strategy that seeks to unify the management of on-premises and public cloud environments, so customers can access their data wherever it lives as if it were hosted on a local file system.

“A hybrid cloud strategy is critical to ensuring organizations can keep pace with the growth and complexity of distributed data and applications, thrive in the face of uncertainty and compete effectively in the digital economy,” said Kim Stevenson, senior vice president and general manager of the foundational data services business unit at NetApp.

Today’s updates clearly help NetApp to further that strategy. Steve McDowell, an analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy, told SiliconANGLE the new ONTAP release is all about removing the complexity of deploying storage for hybrid cloud, and that the most positive change is the enhanced user experience it offers. He explained that one of the things information technology administrators most appreciate about the cloud model is the ease of manageability it delivers, and said that is precisely what the new ONTAP enables.

“NetApp has delivered an update that contains a lot of much-needed work in simplifying the management experience, data protection capabilities, and overall performance,” McDowell said. “NetApp’s customers are going to really appreciate what the company is delivering here. Storage can be complex, but we’re seeing very real trends around simplifying the experience.”

As for the new release of FlexPod, a reference architecture for server, storage and networking components that are pretested and validated to work together as an integrated infrastructure stack, NetApp said it’s aimed at providing a much better foundation for hybrid cloud environments. It adds new capabilities such as intelligent application placement across on-premises and cloud infrastructure and automated hybrid cloud data workflows, the company said.

Customers now have the option to consume FlexPod as a fully managed, cloudlike service for the first time, NetApp added.

The NetApp StorageGRID release adds support for data encryption using external key management and better compliance and ransomware protection with S3 object locks. Further, it gets a performance boost with the addition of intelligent load balancing.

“NetApp’s customers are going to really appreciate the simplified management flows and performance increases that are being delivered by each of these updates,” McDowell said.

The company also announced a new subscription service for organizations that it said provides customers with the freedom of having cloud capabilities in their own data center, plus with the ability to freely move and manage workloads across various hybrid cloud environments. NetApp Keystone Flex Subscription with Equinix is really just an expansion of NetApp’s Keystone Flex storage-as-a-service offering into Equinix Inc.’s data centers. Customers can tap storage resources in Equinix IBX data centers to benefit from low-latency access to multiple public cloud platforms, all without actually moving any data to the cloud, NetApp said.

“NetApp is expanding Keystone Flex with deeper integration into Equinix data centers,” McDowell said. “This gives NetApp Keystone Flex customers options for deployment worldwide, with 21 data centers across 11 countries, in data centers that are extremely close to public cloud ingress points. So that storage can service hybrid cloud workloads without having to move the data into the cloud itself.”

McDowell added that NetApp claims a latency of less than one millisecond, which he said is “excellent” by any standard.

The analyst said it was expected that NetApp would expand its storage-as-a-service offerings because the concept is rapidly becoming “table stakes” in the storage industry. He pointed to NetApp’s rivals Dell Technologies Inc. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., which upped the ante with their new APEX and Alletra releases earlier this month. Like those new services, NetApp’s Keystone Flex with Equinix offer simplifies billing for customers with a single subscription.

“NetApp is providing a single point of interface for both the storage and hosting,” McDowell explained. “IT customers want that single point of contact for billing and support. It’s the right model.”

Other updates announced today cover NetApp Cloud Manager, which serves as an autonomous cloud volume platform for managing hybrid and multicloud data services. It gives administrators full visibility into those services and provides simplified controls for data sync, data backup, data tiering, file caching and compliance services. Finally, NetApp Astra, which is an application-aware data service for modern, Kubernetes-based container apps that can run on any infrastructure, is now available on-premises, in addition to Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

McDowell summed up today’s updates, saying that NetApp was one of the earliest storage players to recognize that servicing enterprise customers requires integrating into a hybrid cloud infrastructure. “Today’s announcements all coalesce around that reality,” he said. “Everything here will be welcomed by NetApp customers.”

Photo: NetApp