NetApp BlueXP: the unified data experience for the evolved cloud

Author: Beatrice

NetApp has announced the availability of NetApp BlueXP, delivering a simple hybrid multi cloud experience for storage and data services across on-premises and cloud environments.

Organisations today have increasingly moved to hybrid multi cloud environments to accelerate their digital transformation and drive growth, even in uncertain times. But in managing these environments, companies face daunting challenges and inefficiencies that can impede innovation. With BlueXP, NetApp is concentrating on a more ‘evolved cloud’ to simplify and automate critical operations across on-premises and public clouds in order to help organisations drive business impact and improve customer experience.

NetApp BlueXP allows users to manage their broader hybrid multi cloud data estate, including on-premises unified storage and first-party native storage with the leading public cloud providers. Offering a simple, yet powerful experience driven by AIOps, BlueXP delivers integrated, broad data service capabilities to deploy, automate, discover, manage, protect, govern and optimise data, infrastructure, and the business processes that support them – with the flexible consumption options required in today’s cloud-led environment.

“Today’s cloud environments are complex. Organisations are looking for a better cloud experience – simpler, streamlined, governed, and optimised for performance and cost across their entire hybrid multi cloud environment,” says Archana Venkatraman, Research Director, Cloud Data Management, IDC. “An ‘evolved cloud’ is one of the most grounded, AI-driven, and practical approaches to cloud management as a whole – and organisations will quickly benefit from migration to operations, to FinOps, to innovation.”

“With the launch of BlueXP, NetApp is uniquely positioned to help organisations unlock the promise of the cloud by making infrastructure, applications and data true assets to their business,” says George Kurian, Chief Executive Officer at NetApp. “By taking an evolved cloud approach, customers can integrate cloud into their architecture and operations, eliminate complexity and increase their speed of innovation to deliver quickly on the business outcomes that matter most.”

NetApp BlueXP capabilities include:

• Unified storage management: the SaaS-delivered BlueXP global control plane gives a single point of visibility and management over wide-ranging hybrid multi cloud environments. This includes the ability to manage NetApp AFF, FAS, StorageGRID, and E-Series on-premises storage, as well as the major clouds with Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, Azure NetApp Files, Google Cloud Volumes Service and Cloud Volumes ONTAP, all in a single console.
• AIOps-driven health: integrated AI/ML-driven automation reduces manpower demands, resource loads, and risk profile, while AI-enabled health and status monitoring not only alerts of infrastructure and workload issues, but offers proactive guidance to avoid trouble scenarios. BlueXP integrates NetApp’s leading Active IQ technology for always-on telemetry across the hybrid multi cloud.
• Cyber resilience: unified control of data protection and security with an integrated zero-trust model. A single ransomware dashboard provides company-wide visibility into ransomware vulnerabilities with the ability to fix many issues automatically with a single click.
• Governance at a glance: a complete view of the digital estate to monitor compliance and permissions. The AI/ML capability audits both user and data level activity, immediately detecting anomalies and taking prescribed actions.
• Seamless mobility: integrated data movers allow for copying, syncing, tiering, and caching data across all major clouds and the data centre as easily as ‘drag and drop’. Integrated security and efficiencies ensure data is protected in transit and stored on the lower-cost storage tier possible.
• Flexible consumption: BlueXP allows customers to only pay for the capabilities they need, billed on usage. A digital wallet allows for licenses for data services to be easily interchanged as an enterprise’s needs change. NetApp Keystone, the leading Storage-as-a-Service (STaaS) offering, is integrated into BlueXP to allow customers to manage their consumption-based data centre storage side by side with their cloud storage.

“OpenText serves the majority of the Fortune 100 companies as customers, delivering cloud-native solutions and information management software that helps power their businesses,” says Mark J. Barrenechea, CEO and CTO, OpenText. “We are investing in centralising systems to reduce complexity. As we help organisations move to the cloud, we are leveraging NetApp’s portfolio to actively monitor and manage our hybrid multi cloud environment with a unified control plane, allowing us to efficiently onboard new customers to their cloud of choice in one seamless experience.”