NetApp unveils new features to enhance VMware Cloud Foundation

NetApp has announced new capabilities to support VMware Cloud Foundation deployments. These advancements are designed to enable mutual customers to efficiently run VMware workloads at scale. For over a decade, NetApp and VMware, now under Broadcom's umbrella, have collaborated to help their joint customers maximise the value of their VMware investments.

NetApp has been instrumental as an engineering design partner with VMware, focusing on developing highly available, scalable, and performant storage. The company now introduces capabilities aimed at improving the efficiency of VMware deployments.

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

One key enhancement is the expanded support for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). Customers can simplify their VCF hybrid cloud environments using NetApp ONTAP software for all storage requirements, including standard and consolidated architectures. The latest ONTAP Tools for VMware release will support SnapMirror active sync, providing symmetric active-active data replication capabilities for NetApp storage systems running VMware workloads. This feature offloads data protection from virtualised compute and improves data availability.

NetApp introduced new capabilities for the Azure VMware Solution (AVS) to aid customers in extending or migrating their vSphere workloads to the cloud. To optimise deployments, customers can now use Spot Eco by NetApp with AVS-reserved instances. Spot Eco allows for effective cost management of AVS reserved instances, while Azure NetApp Files can offload data storage, significantly reducing compute costs.

NetApp is also launching enhanced features for its Cloud Insights VM Optimization service, expanding its existing suite to optimise virtual environments, including VMware. This new tool allows customers to reduce costs by increasing VM density, optimising storage to achieve the best price-to-performance ratio, and monitoring the entire environment to ensure performance and adherence to best practices. NetApp is offering a complimentary 30-day trial of Cloud Insights to assist customers in transitioning to the new VMware software subscriptions cost-effectively.

These announcements follow recent enhancements to the NetApp BlueXP disaster recovery service, which now includes guided workflows for designing and executing automated disaster recovery plans for VMware workloads across hybrid cloud environments, with new support for VMFS data stores.

Paul Turner, Vice President of Products for the VCF Division at Broadcom, said, "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 highlighted the importance of these developments. "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. 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 the Enterprise Strategy Group, noted the industry's need for integrated platforms. "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."