Data Backup Digest

In one of their most prolific and noteworthy moves to date, NetApp recently entered into a strategic partnership with the team at Google Cloud in an effort to expand their Data Fabric platform and reach even more users on the cloud. Dubbed NetApp Cloud Volumes for Google Cloud Platform, the new project marks the third cloud partner to leverage NetApp's services in hybrid and public cloud storage.

George Kurian, CEO with NetApp, spoke about the recent developments by saying: "What we’re doing is building state of the art technology here at NetApp and now delivering it in new and transformative ways to enable our customers to change the world with data. That’s a return of NetApp to our original mission, but in a transformative new way."

In addition to their new partnership, NetApp recently updated their Active IQ protocol. Used in predictive analytics and big data processing, the system provides software recommendations and day-to-day workflows meant to streamline operations and enhance productivity.

Brett Roscoe, vice president of product marketing with NetApp, spoke about that upgrade by saying: "Active IQ is basically our AI system that we leverage to help customers manage and remotely monitor their environment. We do that by collecting 3.5 billion data points from all of our systems out in the field today. We then push those to a public cloud analytics engine, and then we provide those insights back to our customers in the form of these recommendations for automated responses within their environments."

The recent partnership between NetApp and Google Cloud puts the search engine and cloud provider comfortably amongst Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services on the list of NetApp's cloud partners. As such, their new product will be a fully managed, cloud-native service that facilitates quick access to any type of data stored within Google's Cloud servers.

NetApp also upgraded their hardware offerings by unveiling the AFF A800. It's an enterprise all-flash array – and the first of its kind to offer full, end-to-end NVMe. With latency coming in at less than 200 microseconds, data transfer speeds as high as 300 GBps and an overall performance of 11.4 million IOPS within a 24-node cluster, it's capable of handling predictive analytics and data processing for some of the most advanced and sophisticated projects.

The AFF A800 is already available for enterprise users. It's fully compatible with fiber networks of 16 or 32 Gbps and ready to support connections up to 100 Gbps when the technology becomes available. As such, users won't have to worry about replacing the device in a year or two.

NetApp even added features to their StorageGRID technology, including new features to prevent the manipulation of archival data in public and private clouds alike. It now provides the option to prevent data from modification, overwriting or erasure until the established retention period expires.

For more information on NetApp, including details on their hybrid or public cloud services, hardware specifications and more, please visit their official website at {{https://www.netapp.com|www.netapp.com}}.