NetApp have released HCI (Hyper-Converged Infrastructure) appliances by partnering with Red Hat’s OpenShift Container Platform to support applications built in Docker and Kubernetes environments. With these HCI appliances, NetApp seeks to address latency and performance issues faced by data centers when providers are looking to scale their cloud applications.
According to NetApp, enterprises are building applications in the cloud to reach business goals fasters, store sensitive data and recover cloud data in times of disasters. They say that these applications, that are stored across data centers, face obstacles when the goal is to expand the business.
Furthermore, they say that enterprises leverage container systems like Docker and Kubernetes, which enable application orchestration in the cloud to manage, scale and migrate traditional workloads.
By integrating their HCI with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, NetApp claims that enterprises will be able to scale quickly without having to worry about speed, latency and bandwidth issues at data centers. They further added that this integration will accelerate the overall performance of data centers by providing enterprises with real-time analytics capabilities.
Speaking about the integration and HCI release, Anthony Lye, Senior Vice President and General Manager of NetApp’s cloud business unit, commented:
Only NetApp has this control plane that can span across the public clouds and crawl across your own HCI infrastructure, giving you the ability to build and define maintain and manage private clouds. Now I think increasingly, we have relevance with cloud architects and application developers.
NetApp believes that they are providing enterprises with a solution that will not compromise performance at the cost of storage. Bharat Badrinath, Vice President of Storage Systems and Software Marketing, commented:
The key difference here is we are improving the latency by orders of magnitude, improving the performance by orders of magnitude with no application rewrites. It’s for managing ever-increasing amounts of data and for those trying to crunch it in ever-increasing amounts of time.
It will be interesting to see how NetApp makes the most of this, following their acquisition of StackPointCloud to simplify the delivery of data and applications in the cloud.