NetApp, together with best-of-breed technology and channel partners, deliver infrastructures, services for the cloud

As part of NetApp's cloud computing news announcements today, NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) highlighted its close relationships with industry-leading IT vendors and enterprise value added resellers (VARs) to provide enterprise customers with the technology and solutions needed to build their cloud infrastructures, including global service providers and system integrators that are leveraging NetApp technology to create cloud service offerings for their own enterprise customers.

“NetApp believes that because there are several elements that must come together to create a cloud infrastructure, no single vendor is able to adequately address each and every layer,” said Patrick Rogers, vice-president of Solutions Marketing, NetApp. “It's imperative that customers identify the right partners that can provide the services, technology, and integration necessary for their unique cloud needs. Today's announcement not only spotlights the best-of-breed partners that NetApp has cultivated to help customers, but also helps validate our technology offering for the cloud thanks to the many service providers and system integrators who are leveraging NetApp solutions.”

Following is an overview of some of the partners and customers NetApp is working with to enable the cloud. To watch a video and hear what they're saying about their relationship with NetApp and the company's strategy and approach to cloud computing, click here.

NetApp works closely with the industry's leading IT vendors to provide joint customers with the solutions and infrastructure needed to enable the cloud. These technology partners include vendors who provide leading management, server, application, software, and networking technologies and solutions that all leverage the power of virtualisation to help deliver a service-oriented dynamic data centre.

"The benefits of cloud computing - improved business agility, self-service, reduced capex - are well documented, but they can only be truly recognised with a comprehensive business service management strategy that reduces risk and drives compliance. Together, BMC and NetApp are providing IT organisations and service providers with a comprehensive, integrated service and storage management solution for cloud and virtual environments."

- Kia Behnia, chief technology officer for BMC Software

“A powerful and flexible IT infrastructure must be in place to deliver upon the key requirements of an IT as a service model. In support of this emerging trend, Brocade intends to work with industry partners such as NetApp through our Network Infrastructure as a Service (NIaaS) technology platform, which is designed to support a heterogeneous environment and interoperate seamlessly with multiple manufacturer products and all virtualisation software offerings. Brocade and NetApp have long shared a goal of helping our mutual customers drive out costs, improve agility, and increase reliability, and this collaboration is the latest example of that.”

- Dave Stevens, vice-president and chief technology officer for Brocade

“As our customers simplify and streamline their cloud data centre infrastructure they need to ensure that their networking, computing, and storage infrastructure work seamlessly together. Cisco is working with industry-leading companies like NetApp to ensure interoperability for dynamic networking and unified computing solutions to help enterprise customers unleash the power of their enterprise clouds.”

- Soni Jiandani, vice-president of marketing, Server Access Virtualisation Business Group for Cisco

“Citrix Cloud Centre (C3) integrated with NetApp storage systems provides cloud providers with a robust platform for delivering infrastructure as a service. As the foundation for Citrix C3, XenServer and Citrix Essentials enable cloud service providers to seamlessly leverage the advanced NetApp storage capabilities across their cloud platform, reducing the time and cost to deploy highly scalable and elastic services.”

- Frank Artale, vice-president of business development for Citrix Systems

“CA and NetApp are excited about how enterprises and cloud computing providers utilise automation and virtualisation to drive business value in the next-generation data centre and achieve lean IT. Storage is a key part of the overall IT as a service value. We look forward to continued collaboration that integrates CA's business-driven automation and assurance offerings with NetApp's storage management solutions to help customers create and leverage a cloud-based business service.”

- Roger Pilc, corporate senior vice-president and general manager for CA's Infrastructure Management and Automation business unit

“As data centre dynamics shift to a service-oriented infrastructure, Fujitsu is committed to providing customers with a complete and well-rounded technology infrastructure for the cloud. In order to deliver cloud solutions to our customers, we work closely with some of the industry's leading virtualisation technology providers such as NetApp.”

- Richard McCormack, senior vice-president, Product & Solution Marketing for Fujitsu America

“Microsoft and NetApp provide powerful solutions for building and managing private cloud infrastructures. We're helping innovative organisations transition to private cloud computing environments by providing them with the required combination of virtualisation, service-oriented management systems, and a scale-out application model. With NetApp storage and Microsoft virtualisations solutions, customers can deploy cost-effective and efficient data centre infrastructure that provides fast response to their businesses' needs.”

- Zane Adam, senior director, virtualisation and management for Microsoft Corp

“SAP Business ByDesign leverages NetApp to provide our customers with a complete, integrated on-demand software as a service (SaaS) solution. With the NetApp platform we are able to quickly provision our internal storage resources, enabling customers to accelerate deployment of their SaaS solution. In addition we can quickly conduct disk-to-disk backup, providing our customers with access to their data on demand. With the help of NetApp our customers experience the reliability and efficiency that they have come to expect from services leveraging cloud principles in internal IT systems.”

- Bernd Himmelsbach, director of SAP Business ByDesign Infrastructure Management for SAP

“With VMware vSphere 4 and NetApp storage technologies, enterprises can build and operate a virtualised, services-based data centre to more rapidly address changes in business requirements, meet the demand for 24x7 business resiliency, and drastically reduce costs. VMware vSphere 4 allows IT to virtualise and allocate resources on demand and complements the special cloud benefits of NetApp storage. VMware and NetApp together help enable the next generation of flexible, reliable enterprise IT services with the efficiency, control, and choice that cloud computing offers.”

- Parag Patel, vice-president, Alliances, for VMware

Enterprise VARs are integral components of NetApp's success today. NetApp and its channel partners have been working closely to deliver a broad set of virtualisation solutions to help customers achieve a cost-efficient data centre. Many of these partners share NetApp's vision of the cloud and will continue the close collaboration to serve their customers.

"Our reseller partners have the choice of selling or leasing equipment to their customers, or simply taking advantage of our infrastructure-as-a-service offering. Our partners can offer their customers the benefits of a data centre without the capital expenditure and issues of having to own and operate one. These cloud services become just an expense item for our partners' end customers, not an ongoing challenge of managing infrastructure and finding and retaining good people."

- Stephen Lester, director of IT for Avnet Technology Solutions

“INX is pleased to partner with NetApp as a strategic cloud computing partner. INX leverages NetApp technology to offer both internal and external cloud computing services to our clients in the form of dynamic data centre architecture, hosted production and disaster recovery services, and in managed services. NetApp also plays a pivotal role in driving efficiencies in our internal operations, which also helps us to better address our clients' challenges.”

- Mark Hilz, president and chief operating officer for INX

"NetApp is a strategic cloud computing partner for Long View. With NetApp storage and data management we can build a service-based and virtualised dynamic infrastructure that forms the foundation for efficient internal or external cloud solutions for our enterprise customers. We look forward to continued collaboration with NetApp to bring automated cloud services to our customers to improve business agility and reduce data centre costs.”

- Dan Sottile, senior vice-president, North America Sales, Marketing, and Business Development for Long View

Some of the world's leading service providers utilise NetApp storage and data management solutions at the core of their cloud service offerings. By leveraging NetApp's unique technologies and solutions for the cloud, service providers are able to provide their customers with competitive service-level agreements, faster service delivery, and lower costs. NetApp is committed to providing its service provider customers with tailored solutions and technologies that address their customers' unique cloud infrastructure requirements.

“At Joyent, we leverage NetApp's storage solutions to deliver the core of our cloud storage product line-up. More and more enterprises are transitioning to the cloud. Joyent is focused on ensuring that when our customers make this transition they do not have to give up high-performance, reliable, enterprise-class storage and disaster recovery tools. NetApp storage allows these customers to take their business-critical apps from their data centre to the Joyent Cloud.”

- Mark Mayo, vice-president of Engineering for Joyent

"Rackspace relies on NetApp storage and data management technology for a variety of hosting options. NetApp is a key component in powering The Rackspace Cloud, our cloud division. With NetApp we can create a virtual, shared, and dynamic infrastructure with extremely high utilization. This allows us to provide industry-leading cost efficiencies to our customers. Rackspace also uses NetApp to provide Dedicated NAS services to Enterprise Managed Hosting customers seeking a dedicated file storage and data protection solution."

- John Engates, chief technology officer for Rackspace

“Our NetApp platform provides Siemens IT Solutions and Services with advanced capabilities, including storage virtualisation, thin provisioning (FlexVol), data deduplication, file consolidation, disk-based recovery, remote replication, cloning, ATA support, and multiple connectivity choices - all in a single, unified platform. They are foundation technologies for our infrastructure-as-a-service and private cloud capabilities. These features, when leveraged with virtualisation, create the structure for a dynamic storage environment that can be provisioned based on business needs in real time.”

- John Hill, chief technology officer for Siemens IT Solutions and Services

“Tata Communications has built its global hosting, on-demand storage services based on leading technologies and industry practices. Using NetApp for our cloud-based services allows us to easily manage and monitor our infrastructure to provide secure, 24x7x365 availability and lower costs for our enterprise customers while relieving them of the day-to-day management of their IT infrastructure. Together with NetApp we enable our customers to flexibly support their business requirements today and then quickly scale up or down as their business needs change, paying only for what they need.”

- Abid Qadiri, vice-president, Data Center Services for Tata Communications

“Terremark has leveraged NetApp's technology to deliver reliable storage and disaster recovery solutions for many years. As a recognised leader in cloud computing, we feel that the features, reliability, efficiency and manageability of NetApp technologies complement Terremark's ability to deliver advanced cloud-based services to enterprise-class customers.”

- Tom Mays, senior vice-president for Terremark

“T-Systems provides over 170 enterprise customers worldwide with cloud services for key applications like SAP and Microsoft Exchange with our Dynamic Services offering. Together with our technology partners we are able to achieve 90% service infrastructure utilisation, allowing us to pass on both cost savings and higher service levels to our customers. In fact, our customers see up to 30% reduction in cost using Dynamic Services vs in-house hosting. Furthermore, our customers benefit from integrated data protection and secure multi-tenancy while we are able to flexibly scale IT resources up and down in a matter of hours rather than days or weeks. NetApp is an essential component to enabling all of these benefits by regularly and reliably delivering on our specific requirements.”

- Olaf Heyden, member of the Board of Management T-Systems for ICT Operations

NetApp provides its system integrator customers with the storage infrastructure for their cloud service offerings. As a result these system integrators are able to deliver the unique solutions that an enterprise environment demands.

“Accenture's clients have many requirements for cloud infrastructures, including economy of implementation, simplicity of operation, high-performance, multi-application processing, and assured data security. Accenture and its technology partners such as NetApp are committed to delivering this combination to enable our clients to reduce costs while improving responsiveness and performance.”

- John Kaltenmark, managing director for Accenture Technology Consulting

“Enterprises look to cloud computing to reduce costs and deliver critical performance requirements through shared environments. Avanade and NetApp collaborated to shift one of the world's largest exchange environments to a virtualised, shared infrastructure. The move delivers reliable service levels, even during rapid shifts in locations and activity.”

- Tyson Hartman, chief technology officer and vice-president of Enterprise Technology Solutions for Avanade

“CSC collaborates with NetApp to deploy CSC Dynamic Desktop to help clients drive additional cost and complexity out of their virtual desktop IT environment and deliver optimised computing capacity. To date, the companies have jointly developed and delivered cloud-enabled solutions, integrated data centre solutions, high-performance computing systems, and managed infrastructure services. We are very pleased to be working with world-class technology partners such as NetApp to provide customers with sound business solutions backed by an experienced IT services leader.”

- Russ Owen, president of CSC's Managed Services Sector

“Unisys is pleased to partner with NetApp to provide the federal sector with an innovative utility storage service offering. This scalable 'pay-as-you-go' solution allows clients to access their data with the assurance that their assets are securely managed within a proven and structured delivery framework. This unique offering provides significant flexibility and cost benefits to clients and positions NetApp and Unisys as leading providers of data centre transformation solutions for the federal government.”

- Venkatapathi Puvvada, managing partner, Horizontal Services and chief technology officer for Unisys Federal

Discuss this news in the NetApp cloud community, where you can exchange thoughts and ideas on a variety of topics with our community members. Collaborate with our company; engage in conversation with NetApp leaders and employees; and participate in our passion to go further, faster. Join the cloud discussion today.

To learn more about today's news, read the press release about NetApp's new technologies and solutions for the cloud or visit the NetApp Cloud Experience.

For more perspective on NetApp's cloud enablement strategy and vision, please visit one of several NetApp blogs, including that of Dave Hitz, NetApp founder and executive vice-president (http://blogs.netapp.com/dave); Jay Kidd, NetApp's chief marketing officer (http://blogs.netapp.com/jay); and the new “Breaking Through the Cloud” NetApp team blog (http://blogs.netapp.com/cloud/).

Also, listen to Val Bercovici, NetApp cloud czar, in a two-part series on iNside NetApp discussing all things cloud, including customer requirements, NetApp's definition, and NetApp's approach to helping customers deploy the cloud.

Please visit NetApp Play-by-Play as Jeff O'Neal, senior director of Data Centre Solutions for NetApp, takes a deeper dive into how NetApp is enabling ITaaS.