Netapp has come a long way since 1992. It may have begun as a storage company 25 years ago, but it didn’t rest on its laurels and today, it is claiming mindshare as a leader in data insight, access and control for hybrid cloud environments.
As if to nod its head to Netapp’s achievements, 2016 was the year that Netapp was recognised as a Fortune 500 company.
Along the way, there had been a string of acquisitions, its most notable being solid-state, scale-out storage systems, SolidFire, and its most recent in last August, was GreenQloud, a cloud management platform technology for private clouds.
This year alone, they acquired three companies – there is GreenQloud, Immersive Partner Solutions, which is a cloud-based converged infrastructure monitoring and compliance provider, and Plexistor’s persistent memory technology that can be supported by commodity hardware, and still deliver low latency and millions of IO per seconds.
Netapp has established leadership, according to IDC, in areas like storage and device management software, open networked branded storage operating system, capacity share in integrated infrastructure and certified reference systems. This is in recognition of Netapp solutions namely, OnCommand Insight (OCI), ONTAP and its joint-venture with Cisco, FlexPod integrated appliances.
While all of these were happening, the 25 year old company had also recognised from pretty early on, that data is the main ingredient to at least hundreds of digital transformation strategies over the next ten years, or so.
Netapp is poised to bring all its experience, expertise and technologies to bear, and be the data authority in a hybrid cloud world.
On the right track
Brett Roscoe is another ‘acquisition’ that Netapp made from Dell, earlier this year. Now, as Netapp’s new VP of Product, Solutions and Services Marketing, Roscoe had shared, “The business titans of 20 years ago are struggling to remain relevant today. 67-percent have put digital transformation at the centre of their growth and profitability strategies.”
The industry recognises that the lifeblood of the organisation is its data. It needs to have a culture of data, because in huge enough amounts, it reveals insights to optimise operations, create business opportunities, and enable more meaningful interactions with end users.
But data poses huge challenges – there is so much of it, not to mention, there are so many types of data, and they are distributed all over the organisation, behind firewalls, outside firewalls, on multiple clouds, and even more multiple different devices and more. Managing data, much less accessing and optimising it, is becoming more and more complex because of this.
Well-positioned
Today, Roscoe believes Netapp to be uniquely positioned to come alongside its customers, and help them embrace new capabilities like cloud and software-defined infrastructure, among other things, that can help them along on their digital transformation journey.
Netapp HAS come a long way from being just a storage provider 25 years ago. Capabilities were built, enhanced, expanded, and valuable experience was gained.
Today, core to Netapp’s data authority strategy is its Data Fabric technology; it is in part, a culmination of the storage footprint it has grown over the years, as well as all the other capabilities built into it, like security via authentication, real-time recovery, and data protection.
Data Fabric is also efficient; data can be efficiently stored and managed now, leaving resources to be freed up and channelled towards where it is more needed.
Data Fabric spans flash storage, disk storage and cloud, and provides an integrated approach to managing the private, public and hybrid cloud world, via tools that offer consistent experiences across on-premise and cloud environments.
A quote during IDC Directions 2016, goes like this: Data management across your entire data infrastructure is the key to unlocking value from connected devices.
