When it comes to infrastructural needs, it always boils down to price, performance and ease of use, both in the cloud and on-premise.

To tackle the hustle of enhancing a software-defined data center with additional hosts, decoupling storage from compute and memory is of the essence and Amazon FSx for NetAPP ONTAP helps with this objective, according to Phil Brotherton (pictured, right), vice president of solutions at NetApp Inc.

“When we first started working with Amazon, it was clear that there’s just the ability to call EC2 just quickly, and so my team developed as a SaaS essentially,” Brotherton stated. “ONTAP is a software layer that runs on EC2, EBS and S3. When we first built that out, we were trying to provide file services easily on the Amazon cloud enterprise file services. The next step … now you got to get VMware onto ONTAP.”

Brotherton and Samir Kadoo (left), worldwide VMware strategic alliance solutions architecture leader at Amazon Web Services Inc., spoke with theCUBE industry analysts John Furrier and Rob Strechay at VMware Explore 2023, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the powerful capabilities availed by Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP. (* Disclosure below.)

Tackling the changing cloud economics landscape

Since the cloud economics are changing fast, the VMware Cloud on AWS integration with Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP is meant to offer high-performance and cost-optimized virtualized storage infrastructure, according to Kadoo. This plays an instrumental role in SDDC advancement.

“With NetApp ONTAP, it comes into play where you can leverage AWS services,” he said. “How can I leverage my investment knowledge of NetApp technologies with VMware Cloud on AWS?”

The teamwork between NetApp, AWS and VMware Inc. has played an instrumental role in ensuring that the networking piece is correct. This is because before the Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP advancement a transit gateway had to be used, Brotherton pointed out.

“Bringing basically all the integrations we’ve done with VMware up into the management plane so you can drive the enterprise data management out of the management plane of VMware,” he noted. “Having that run on the Amazon cloud which then makes it extensible to all the Amazon services. It’s a really powerful capability.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VMware Explore 2023:

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE