Data storage firm NetApp Inc. said today it’s expanding its long-standing partnership with the virtualization software giant VMware Inc.

The companies announced a trio of new customer-driven initiatives that aim to help customers reduce the cost, risk and complexity of migrating enterprise workloads to multicloud architectures. They made the announcement as VMware’s VMware Explore conference starts this week in San Francisco.

Over the years, NetApp and VMware have come up with multiple product integrations aimed at making these cloud migrations easier. They also provide joint offerings that help companies to accelerate the performance and delivery of both traditional and modern applications in the cloud, while easing daily operations by integrating VMware’s tools with NetApp’s data management infrastructure.

NetApp said today that modern applications today can benefit from an innovative new approach to enterprise workload and data management infrastructure. As a result, more companies are turning to the public cloud. With this shift, they need new and integrated platforms to manage their applications while efficiently managing their cloud resources. This is where NetApp and VMware are sharpening their focus.

The first initiative involves NetApp and VMware working together to certify and support VMware Cloud and NetApp Cloud Services on the world’s three largest public cloud platforms — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. By doing so, customers running applications on VMware that utilize NetApp’s storage environments will be able to migrate and extend data-intensive workloads and files to the cloud.

NetApp said customers are now able to “right-size” their cloud compute and storage architectures to fit the cloud of their choice. In this way, customers can shift on-premises VMware workloads that use NetApp to the cloud platform of their choice. By doing so, they’ll benefit from reduced costs, better control and also avoid the hassles involved in refactoring on-premises workloads to run in the cloud.

A second new initiative pertains to VMware Cloud Foundation with Tanzu, which is used by enterprises to manage virtual machines and orchestrate software containers that host the components of modern apps, from a single platform. VMware Cloud Foundation with Tanzu has added support for NetApp’s ONTAP-based storage arrays, meaning customers can now access a more flexible data fabric for both VMs and containers. This flexibility will help customers to build new applications and deploy them alongside traditional VM-based workloads more easily.

Finally, NetApp said, it has worked with VMware to implement new and expanded support for vSphere and virtualized Volumes on its latest file and block storage platforms. The goal here is to help companies improve data center optimization, NetApp explained.

For instance, it now supports the use of vVols with NVMe-oF, providing more enhanced block storage flash performance, and more granular VM storage management, with support for various types of network transports, including Ethernet and standard TCP/IP networks. There’s also a new integration to support virtualized workloads across NFS 4.1 environments, the company said. As a result, customers will be able to squeeze more storage performance out of their storage infrastructure for traditional virtualized workloads.

Photo: Elchinator/Pixabay