NetApp bolsters VMware Cloud Foundation with new capabilities

NetApp has announced new capabilities to support VMware Cloud Foundation deployments, allowing customers to optimise their IT environments for efficient operation of VMware workloads.

With this advancement, NetApp aims to help customers navigate changes in their VMware by Broadcom subscriptions through NetApp solutions both on-premises and in the cloud.

For over a decade, NetApp and VMware, now acquired by Broadcom, have collaborated to enhance the success of their joint customers. NetApp has been instrumental as an engineering design partner with VMware, focusing on highly available, scalable, and performant storage solutions. This partnership continues to evolve, with NetApp now introducing new capabilities that promise greater efficiency for joint customers' VMware deployments.

"NetApp and Broadcom are working together to take the uncertainty out of hybrid cloud environments," said Jonsi Stefansson, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at NetApp.

"More than 20,000 customers rely on NetApp to support their VMware workloads. NetApp's continued close collaboration with Broadcom following the acquisition of VMware ensures our solutions seamlessly interoperate so our mutual customers can leverage a single intelligent data infrastructure to operate their VMware workloads more efficiently," Stefansson says.

NetApp is offering several enhancements to optimise costs, simplify operations, and increase flexibility for VMware environments. Key updates include:

• Expanded support for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF): NetApp ONTAP software now supports all storage requirements in VCF hybrid cloud environments, including standard and consolidated architectures. The latest ONTAP Tools for VMware (OTV) release includes SnapMirror active sync for active-active data replication capabilities, enhancing data protection and availability for VMware workloads.
• New capabilities for Azure VMware Solution (AVS): Customers extending or migrating vSphere workloads to the cloud can now use Spot Eco by NetApp with AVS reserved instances to maximise their deployments. This combination aims to reduce compute costs while using Azure NetApp Files for data storage offloading.
• Enhanced VM optimisation features for NetApp Cloud Insights: The introduction of Cloud Insights VM Optimisation provides tools for customers to reduce costs by increasing VM density, optimising storage for the best price-to-performance ratio, and monitoring the entire environment for availability, performance, and compliance with best practices.

These offerings follow a recent update to NetApp BlueXP™ disaster recovery service, which now supports VMFS datastores and provides guided workflows for designing and executing automated disaster recovery plans for VMware workloads across hybrid cloud environments.

Paul Turner, Vice President of Products for the VCF Division at Broadcom, commented, "As organisations modernise infrastructure with VMware Cloud Foundation, they want to know that the services upon which they rely from industry leaders such as NetApp will continue to work seamlessly and deliver the value they have come to expect. Having NetApp as a close collaborator helps our mutual customers deploy innovative data and storage services on top of their private cloud platform, and ensure they are getting the most value out of their VMware environments."

Brett Tanzer, Vice President of Product Management at Microsoft, also expressed support for the new capabilities. "We have made Microsoft Azure the cloud of choice for VMware environments and offer fast and cost-effective solutions enabling many customers to move their VMware workloads to the cloud. As VMware customers navigate changes to operating virtualised environments, we have given our customers a way to lock in secure and predictable pricing over multiple years. NetApp's data management and cloud observability capabilities help our customers ensure those deployments are delivering the return on investment they need."

Scott Sinclair, Practice Director at Enterprise Strategy Group, added, "In an ever more complicated world of cloud, data, and infrastructure operations, IT teams are increasingly looking for holistic platforms over point solutions. These joint updates from NetApp and Broadcom enable customers to use NetApp’s intelligent data infrastructure to consolidate multiple data operations onto a single platform with industry-leading data management and CloudOps capabilities. That will help customers drive greater operational and infrastructure efficiencies that reduce the total cost of ownership for their VMware investments."