Adding supplemental storage, including at multicloud, is one of the main advantages of the Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP product.

The new product, long in development and now commercially available for partners to sell, is the only third-party cloud storage service to be certified and supported as a supplemental datastore for VMware Cloud for AWS, according to Keith Norbie (pictured, left), senior director of worldwide partner solutions and sales acceleration at NetApp Inc.

“It’s a big opportunity for the people that actually deliver this for the customers,” he stated. “We can now use those supplemental data stores and be able to shrink that size. So it saves the customer massive amounts of money: 25%, 50% in savings without sacrificing anything,” he said

Norbie and Brandon Jackson (pictured), pre-sales specialized engineer, VMware SDDC, at CDW LLC, spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Lisa Martin and David Nicholson at last year’s VMware Explore event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the product’s capabilities and potential cost opportunities. (* Disclosure below.)

More business, flexible cloud

“We get the flexibility of cloud; we get the scalability of easy storage now in a way we didn’t have before, and we get the power that’s VMware,” Jackson said. “They can easily grow their storage and use all those operational efficiencies and the things that they love about NetApp already. It makes it so easy to have that conversation with the customers and it just clicks.”

Interestingly, the duo touch on some of the uniqueness of the message. “The nice thing about this is it’s not relegated to a single industry vertical. It’s not a single type of customer,” Jackson explained. “We see this across the board and certainly with any of our cloud infrastructure solutions.”

Among other things: Enterprises can now more quickly and cheaply move workloads to AWS, according to Norbie. Scaling cloud storage independent of cloud compute is another big advantage. Those cost benefits conceivably unlock new business overall with the promise of more efficiently sized compute and storage solutions.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VMware Explore:

(* Disclosure: NetApp Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither NetApp nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE