NetApp expands multi-cloud capabilities to empower AI
Capacity, performance, agility and consistency are some of the key areas of focus for vendors as they approach multi-cloud storage and AI requirements.
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Published: 24 Jul 2024
In an era when nearly every business uses more than one public cloud provider, technology -- especially storage technology -- must adapt to embrace this multi-cloud reality.
In research from TechTarget's Enterprise Strategy Group to be published later in 2024, 82% of organizations agreed that using multiple cloud providers delivers strategic benefits for their organization. A successful multi-cloud strategy, however, cannot be limited to simply using multiple public cloud providers. Multi-cloud alone is no longer a differentiator. At a minimum, there must be a level of consistency across the various platforms. This consistency will reduce the expertise burden tied to using different providers and simplify the movement of data or applications across environments.
Multi-cloud adoption is fueled by the many benefits it brings, and chief among them is typically agility. An organization cannot be agile if each environment has its own disparate control, capabilities and user experience. As a result, many storage providers, such as Dell Technologies, Hitachi Vantara, HPE, NetApp and Pure Storage, offer or have announced plans to offer consistency across cloud environments as well as on- and off-premises environments.
How multi-cloud storage needs to evolve
As organizations mature in their usage of multi-cloud data storage environments, consistency becomes more essential for success, but consistency of experience alone is no longer sufficient. Storage providers must continue to innovate to strengthen their capabilities in each public cloud environment. They must also improve how the entire multi-cloud storage platform can improve agility and better enable business-critical, high-value workloads, such as those based on artificial intelligence.
NetApp, an early pioneer of multi-cloud data storage, recently announced a number of new storage capabilities expanding on its native public cloud storage options. They include the following:
NetApp GenAI Toolkit – Microsoft Azure NetApp Files Version.
Amazon Bedrock with Amazon FSx for NetApp OnTap reference architecture.
This announcement included multiple elements that align with how multi-cloud storage must evolve. NetApp is strengthening its native cloud storage offerings for AWS and Microsoft Azure. The vendor is also adding tools to improve how organizations can better use the benefits of multi-cloud environments for both applications and data.
Storage providers must continue to innovate to strengthen their capabilities in each public cloud environment.
For example, with recent enhancements to Amazon FSx for NetApp OnTap, AWS and NetApp have expanded both the capacity and performance of this native storage offering in response to rising data requirements. This enhanced technology now offers up to 6 GB per second of throughput from 512 TiB of storage, with scalability up to 72 GB per second from 1 PiB of storage. Considering the widespread desire to increase adoption and usage of data-intensive workloads in the cloud, higher-performance access to larger volumes of data becomes more and more essential.
NetApp also introduced BlueXP Workload Factory, which helps speed up cloud migrations by simplifying the process of comparing resource options for cost and performance. A common but often hidden cost of multi-cloud flexibility is the extra effort required to understand what level of resources is required to deliver the expected application experience. According to Enterprise Strategy Group research to be published later in 2024, 72% of organizations agreed that they struggle to properly size workloads for the optimal infrastructure, on or off premises.
Support for growing generative AI demand
The integration of the NetApp GenAI Toolkit with Azure NetApp Files helps organizations integrate their private enterprise data stored in Azure NetApp Files into retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) workflows. RAG offers a less resource-intensive method of augmenting existing models with proprietary data. It eliminates the need to train an entirely new model and reduces the chances of hallucinations with already-existing models.
For Amazon Bedrock with Amazon FSx for NetApp OnTap reference architecture, NetApp and AWS offer guidance on how best to implement RAG-enabled workflows on data stored within Amazon FSx for NetApp OnTap.
While NetApp is not alone in its support of multi-cloud storage, these announcements drive forward a likely -- and needed -- future for multi-cloud storage innovation. Beyond simply multi-cloud consistency, businesses need tools and technologies to continue to enhance what is possible within each cloud provider. They need simple, agile data movement to and across clouds, and they require tools to maximize the value of the data wherever it resides.
In the multi-cloud era of IT, multi-cloud storage is a must. And in the emerging era of AI, consistency alone will not be enough. Organizations need tools and technology to optimize their multi-cloud environments, simplify data movement and improve the usage of that data.
Scott Sinclair is practice director with TechTarget's Enterprise Strategy Group, covering the storage industry.
Enterprise Strategy Group is a division of TechTarget. Its analysts have business relationships with technology vendors.
