How NetApp and Equinix Metal Bring Unique Capabilities to Shared Customers
When people talk about the benefits of dedicated cloud infrastructure – meaning platforms that give them the control and predictability of full hardware access and networking capabilities – they usually think first and foremost about application hosting. By delivering a simpler environment that is free of noisy neighbors, dedicated compute environments help applications perform at their best.
But dedicated cloud isn't just for app hosting. It also offers unique benefits for data storage use cases – benefits that include, but are not limited to, higher performance.
That, at least, is what our partners at NetApp tell us. We're inclined to believe them, because we suspect the folks at NetApp – which specializes in helping businesses manage data across any infrastructure, at any scale – know a thing or two about what it takes to deliver an optimal data experience.
Keep reading for a look at what NetAp STaaS says about the benefits of dedicated cloud infrastructure for data hosting, as well as the unique capabilities that Equinix Metal unlocks for NetApp and its customers.
NetApp's mission: Simplifying data storage in a complex world
Through products like ONTAP, NetApp helps businesses manage data in a unified way, even if their data is spread across multiple clouds, data centers and/or on-prem servers.
That's important, of course, because most businesses today don't store all of their data in one place. In a world where nine out of ten companies have multi-cloud strategies, and where 80 percent operate hybrid cloud architectures, the ability to centralize data management, monitoring and security across disparate data hosting environments is critical.
NetApp supports data hosted on virtually any platform or infrastructure, not just Equinix Metal. But for data that does live in Metal, NetApp STaaS is able to provide customers with special advantages that wouldn't be possible elsewhere.
Delivering "freedom of choice"
Arguably, the single greatest advantage of dedicated cloud infrastructure is flexibility and control. In a dedicated environment, there are virtually no limits on how NetApp's customers can configure storage infrastructure.
Lee Howard, NetApp's Senior Director for Strategic Partner Engineering, puts it this way: "The freedom of choice to be able to design the ecosystem is what is unique about dedicated cloud. You can build the stack that best fits your needs and get a custom fit."
What he means is that, down to core hardware elements, customers can pick and choose exactly how their storage infrastructure is set up. "Do you want to use iSCSI or Fiber? Do you want block or object storage? If you're using Metal and ONTAP, you can do whatever you need," Howard says.
Performance optimization
Dedicated cloud environments also help to supercharge the performance of data, but not primarily for the same reasons as they accelerate app performance. With data, noisy neighbors and hypervisor overhead aren't the major barriers to performance. Instead, latency when transferring data between data centers is the major bottleneck that NetApp customers need to break through.
Here, Equinix's interconnect solution, Equinix Fabric, is a key differentiator. Whether NetApp customers are moving data between Equinix data centers, or from Equinix locations into public clouds or other platforms, Fabric helps them do so as quickly as possible.
"Equinix is cloud-adjacent, which means you can build high-speed, low-latency connections to the cloud," NetApp Global Alliance Director of Services Providers Manager Martin Richards says. "That is so powerful, and Equinix Fabric is the key to it all."
He added that Equinix Fabric is especially valuable for NetApp customers because NetApps also integrates with all of the major hyperscalers – so by combining Equinix with NetApp, organizations get the ability to deploy workloads easily across any public cloud, while also benefiting from ultra-high performing network connectivity to move data wherever it needs to go.
Alberto Reynoso, NetApp Business Development Manager adds that the performance benefits that Fabric enables dovetail with the flexibility and freedom of choice described above because Fabric ensures that no matter where customers place data and apps, the network doesn't become a barrier to performance. "From public cloud, to dedicated and private cloud, to on-prem, it can all connect through Fabric," he says.
Data security
Helping customers protect data against threats like ransomware is a key priority for NetApp. To do this, products like ONTAP offer features such as the detection of anomalous I/O patterns, which can trigger automated isolation of data before attackers have a chance to encrypt or exfiltrate it.
These features work on any platform, but the minimal latency of Equinix Metal environments makes them especially potent. When you're blocking ransomware attacks in real time, milliseconds matter, and Metal’s dedicated infrastructure provides the response times necessary to minimize the risk of successful attacks.
The fact that Metal provides dedicated servers, eliminating the inherent risks of shared hosting, further enhances the security of data. "You get an end-to-end, highly secure, single-tenant environment," Richards says.
Meeting evolving data storage challenges
When you put these advantages – customizability, performance and security – together, you maximize your ability to meet not just today's data storage challenges and priorities, but also those that may arrive in the future.
For example, Lee notes that businesses face increasing pressure to update environments continuously. "Gone is the old way where you provision a giant, monolithic stack that you rarely change," he says.
Making frequent changes to data storage environments when customers host workloads on Metal and manage them with NetApp STaaS. Both companies offer powerful APIs for configuring environments and infrastructure, which helps teams make changes at any scale in an automated way.
Likewise, Richards points to sustainability metrics as another growing priority that Metal helps NetApp customers address. "In the past people just talked about sustainability, but now many organizations face a mandate to show sustainability metrics," he explains. Metal helps in this regard by reporting metrics about infrastructure power consumption and energy efficiency, which NetApp customers can leverage to track the sustainability implications of their data workloads.
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