“It’s our belief that the world’s ongoing energy challenges require innovative solutions and we are steadfastly committed to continuing to develop energy-efficient technologies and solutions that allow our customers to greatly reduce their carbon footprint. We’re also committed to expanding sustainable practices within our business by setting a bold, achievable target of a 50 percent intensity reduction of Scope 3 Greenhouse Gas emissions by 2030,” said George Kurian, Chief Executive Officer at NetApp.

With new tools and resources announced at NetApp INSIGHT, organizations can more effectively achieve their carbon reduction goals while meeting their customer demands:

• NetApp BlueXP delivers a unified experience across hybrid multi-cloud environments to bring all application and data storage services into a single control plane.
• NetApp Cloud Insights Dashboard is a new feature that reports on power usage and temperature for ONTAP storage.
• Lifecycle Assessment (LCA) carbon footprint reports leveraging the Product Attribute Impact Algorithm (PAIA) methodology.
• NetApp’s 4:1 Storage Efficiency Guarantee covers all ONTAP all-flash systems, including AFF A-Series, AFF C190, All SAN Array, and FAS500f.
• NetApp Cloud Tiering allows companies to automatically and seamlessly move infrequently used data from on-premises ONTAP storage to the cloud.
• NetApp Cloud Data Sense is a data catalog and classification solution that uses artificial intelligence to map and classify all cloud and on-premises data.

“NetApp’s ongoing commitment to innovation in our product portfolio, combined with the company’s decarbonization efforts, provide organizations with the tools and resources they need to reduce costs, run more efficient operations, and enable emissions-based decision making to achieve their own sustainability goals,” said Cesar Cernuda, President at NetApp.

“The NetApp and NVIDIA alliance has delivered industry-leading innovation for years, and this new qualification for NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD builds on that momentum,” said Walid Issa, Senior Manager, PreSales and Solutions Engineering – Middle East Region at NetApp.

Charlie Boyle, Vice President of DGX systems at NVIDIA said, “our collaboration with NetApp enables customers building their own AI Centers of Excellence to now choose NetApp storage for their NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD, as well as use the same leading platform available as hosted infrastructure through NVIDIA DGX Foundry.”

NetApp’s portfolio of NVIDIA-accelerated solutions includes ONTAP AI to eliminate guesswork for faster adoption by using a field-proven reference architecture as well as a preconfigured, integrated solution that is easy to procure and deploy in a turnkey manner. Jointly, these companies offer customized solutions for a variety of industries, including financial services, medicine, manufacturing, retail, higher education, and government.

George Kurian, CEO at NetApp, said, “the acquisition of Instaclustr will combine NetApp’s established leadership in continuous storage and compute optimization with Instaclustr’s fully-managed database and data pipeline services to give customers a Cloud Operations platform that provides the best and most optimized foundation for their applications in the public clouds and on premises.”

The acquisition of Instaclustr builds on a series of strategic acquisitions made by NetApp to deliver a leading best-of-suite platform for CloudOps. NetApp’s strategic acquisitions including Spot, CloudCheckr, Data Mechanics, Fylamynt and now Instaclustr have made Spot by NetApp a compelling platform for applications on one cloud and across multiple clouds, stated an official release of NetApp.

“Instaclustr’s growth has been driven by the fact that companies want to leverage open-source databases, pipelines, and workflow applications without overwhelming themselves with the complexity and cost of managing and operating them. We are excited for organizations building applications for their multi-cloud and hybrid cloud reality to benefit directly from Instaclustr’s data PaaS solutions along with NetApp and Spot by NetApp’s infrastructure solutions, while minimizing operations burdens,” commented Peter Lilley, CEO and Co-founder at Instaclustr.

CSfC validates commercial IT products that have met the highest level of strict encryption standards and rigorous security requirements for both hardware and software solutions. Recently, the NSA has recommended that federal agencies hosting secret or top-secret data utilize storage solutions that have been CSfC validated.

 “This unique achievement is an example of innovation in commercial technology addressing critical national security issues,” said Admiral Michael S. Rogers USN (Ret.), former Director, National Security Agency (NSA) and Chief, Central Security Service (CSS).

With this CSfC validation, organizations can expect NetApp ONTAP to:

• Allow agencies and enterprises to natively store top-secret data, confidently and reliably
• Save time by making it easier to buy pre-approved solutions, reducing audits, and limiting the processes required to move or store data securely
• Offer cost savings via reduced monitoring, lowering physical data transport and logistics costs, and providing the cost-optimal solution for storing data
• Protect data at both hardware and the software layer for enhanced cyber-resilient data-centric security – a key component to zero-trust security architectures

NetApp has been in the data protection business for nearly 30 years and is a leading data storage and management supplier to federal government, delivering storage innovation and data solutions, including data encryption, both in-flight and at rest, compliance, and protection. The latest release of ONTAP claims to be enabling enterprises to use machine learning to protect against cyber-attacks with integrated preemptive detection and accelerated data recovery.

Michelle Rudnicki, Vice President, US Public Sector at NetApp said, “with NetApp’s world-class data security capabilities and this CSfC validation, government organizations, as well as companies in highly regulated industries like financial services, healthcare, energy or any organization with valuable intellectual property, can be reassured that their most sensitive data is secure with NetApp ONTAP.”

By Fadi Kanafani, Managing Director

How does NetApp become a trusted partner for enterprises that chose cloud solutions?

NetApp is a cloud-led, data-centric organization supported by a global team of cloud storage specialists. We offer unmatched control, insight, simplicity, protection, and efficiency for applications in the cloud. We collaborate with the world’s leading cloud providers -AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud to deliver native solutions in their cloud and offer our customers the best value. NetApp offers customers simplicity in moving their data from whichever platform to the cloud – be it private cloud, on-premise, hybrid, or public cloud, and the flexibility in managing their applications and data spread across different environments without the complexity. We help our customers manage their entire cloud environment and data consistently no matter where it lives.

Fadi Kanafani

What sorts of simplicity does NetApp include in data management through its cloud platforms?

We help customers implement the best cloud storage solutions as part of the data fabric, so businesses can manage their data holistically – no matter where it resides. NetApp offers the public cloud data storage solution that includes a complete, integrated set of data management features to protect and secure customer data, assure business continuity, simplify compliance, preserve integrity, and control access. Our analytics platform – NetApp Cloud Insights and Cloud Data Sense- provides customers with actionable intelligence across their entire IT infrastructure – on-premises and in the public cloud.

The NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is our cloud-based service available on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud that delivers advanced data management for file and block workloads. It helps businesses optimize cloud storage costs and increases application performance while enhancing data protection, security, and compliance. It is self-managed through NetApp Cloud Manager, our single-pane management console for all of the ONTAP instances deployed across hybrid cloud infrastructure.

By Walid Issa, Senior Manager, PreSales and Solutions Engineers – Middle East and Africa

Speak about the partnership with major cloud-space providers. How does NetApp make it beneficial for its customers?

NetApp is uniquely positioned in the market with our long-term collaboration with public cloud providers helping deliver outstanding performance and maximum portability. We provide a portfolio of services for running applications in these clouds that reduce cloud costs by up to 90%. Our platform enables customers to run enterprise applications such as SAP, Oracle, SQL, and high-performance compute jobs – for example, in oil and gas exploration and genomics.

Walis Issa

In a partnership spanning nearly 20 years with Microsoft, we have jointly delivered innovative products that help organizations manage their data anywhere. Azure NetApp Files gives businesses world-class data management with the performance, simplicity, and cost savings you need to migrate your most challenging workloads to Azure.

Through our partnership with Google Cloud, we provide customers with agility, scalability, and security—all the critical elements to drive our customers’ digital transformation needs. NetApp integrated data services simplify how businesses migrate, run, and manage critical workloads on Google Cloud. It gives businesses the power to harness Google’s advanced analytics capabilities to help solve their toughest challenges while saving up to 70% on cloud storage costs

Our partnership with AWS goes back nearly a decade. We have shared a determined focus to help our customers build solutions, reduce costs, and innovate faster in the cloud. With NetApp’s data management capabilities integrated with the scale of AWS, businesses can migrate, build, and manage more cloud at less cost.

Tell us about the opportunities in front of small and large enterprises in the digital transformation era

The need to adapt and change direction quickly is a core principle of a digital business. Enterprise businesses would look to technology as a source of competitive differentiation in terms of improving their customer experience, automating some customer functions, and their call centers. And therefore, from a cloud perspective, they would want to combine public clouds, private clouds, and on-premises resources to gain the agility it needs for a competitive advantage.

Keep in mind that successful digital transformation relies on the intelligent use of data, Enterprise businesses can leverage data to improve the security of their products and services, and to expand customer engagement. They can also use artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning (DL) to realize operational insights and improvements, drive decision making, ensure compliance, improve customer experience, and reduce operational costs.

Briefly compare between private and public cloud in the aspect of enterprise business

Public cloud is the on-demand availability of IT resources such as computers, storage, and infrastructure over the internet via a third-party provider or what is known today as cloud providers or hyperscalers. The private cloud is an internal equivalent to the public cloud. This is driven by the ability to easily consume and modify resource allocation through a self-service method that requires little interaction with users’ internal IT teams. Contrary to popular belief, private clouds aren’t only deployed on-premises. Private clouds might be owned by one organization and managed by another organization like local service providers in a different physical location.

Note that not everything belongs in a public cloud or a private cloud which is why so many forward-thinking companies are choosing a hybrid mixture of cloud services. Hybrid clouds offer the benefits of both public and private clouds and take advantage of existing architecture in a data center.

By Maya Zakhour, Channel Director – Middle East & Africa, Italy and Spain

How do you feel about being a known representation of women in the tech world? What advice do you have for women who aspire for a big and bold career in the tech industry? 

Maya Zakhour

To be recognized as a technology industry influencer is the culmination of years of hard work and dedication to my job and my constant journey of learning and adapting. But this journey doesn’t just end here – I use this recognition to encourage other young women to consider a career in technology, as the options here are endless. Building a career in technology is hard work and some women may feel reluctant to enter technology careers because they are afraid, they do not have enough technical knowledge. However, having curiosity, not technological background, is the top reason one will succeed in the tech industry. You start from the ground and build your way up – no matter what field of technology you choose.

I strongly believe that curiosity will inspire you to identify the problems and dig out the root causes. Careers in technology are not just about acquiring technical knowledge, but about demonstrating leadership and mentorship.

The following are the abstract of NetApp 2022 predictions.

“Digital First” As New Business Paradigm
While IT teams and IT leaders are historically called on to drive digitization and increase value, the roles will be reversed in the post-pandemic world. Strategic decision-making starts with digital experience and digital transformation since they are now deeply connected to the successful operation of any company.
We see this for example in business analytics, where the analysis of user experience journeys or customer experience journeys become a crucial information source for strategic decisions.

Cybersecurity and Resiliency
The pandemic months have triggered a rapid increase in ransomware attacks as more and more people worked remotely. Coincidentally, this opened up a multitude of new infection vectors. Enterprises had to come to terms with the fact that many IT security processes and protocols are not well suited to the fight against ransomware, because it is virtually impossible to cut off all these infection routes, especially when criminals use social engineering. Instead, enterprises will rely on AI-based prevention across their whole domain and stringent zero trust policies. Rather than preventing IT attacks from happening, this approach minimizes their impact. Once an infection happens, it is discovered almost instantaneously: Infected areas are cordoned off and infected files are replaced in almost real-time.

Sustained Impact of the Pandemic: Cloud Acceleration and the Supply Chain
The global supply chain has been brought close to its breaking point by the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on air, sea, and land travel. We predict that cloud adoption will accelerate faster as the supply chain constraints drive buyers to find alternatives to purchasing traditional on-premise infrastructure to meet demands. At the same time, optimization of production lines and business processes can help the system to become more robust in the future.

Productized AI
In 2022, artificial intelligence (AI) starts to permeate all industries. We will see it used in agriculture, food production, fast-food chains, and the entertainment and hospitality sector. Agriculture and the food industry, for example, will use it for packing and processing, while other sectors gain most from general automation and the simplification of their processes.

Data trends
Several technology sub-trends drive change and innovation. One is Analytics & Optimization of digital services. E.g., Finops results are much easier to come by as more automation and smarter applications take hold. This results in increased ROI from cloud investments throughout the public and private sectors.
Another trend concerns production environments. There is a clear move away from applications as companies deliver their services through containerized solutions and microservices.

Sustainability – ESG Becomes a Competitive Advantage
Green topics are on the rise, as demonstrated by the 2021 Climate Change Conference, the US infrastructure deal, or the traffic light coalition coming to power in Germany. We predict that businesses will head in the same direction. This is partly due to regulatory pressure, for example, to lower carbon dioxide emissions. But enterprises will also become intrinsically motivated to deliver green innovation.

The hybrid models, which allow companies to recruit talent everywhere, reduce office footprint, and significantly cut work travel.

Anthony Lye, Executive Vice President & General Manager, Public Cloud Services at NetApp says, “Our strategy has positioned ONTAP as the native shared storage solution with rich data services inside the three public clouds. Now, our public cloud partners provide customers with the simplest path to the cloud and allow them to derive the most value from their data and applications.”

NetApp has partners with Microsoft and Google Cloud to help organizations meet their need for virtual workload storage and disaster recovery.

“Our partnership with NetApp continues to grow, rolling out new capabilities that will make it easier and more cost-effective to deliver enterprise workloads on Google Cloud and bringing customers even more flexibility across hybrid and cloud deployments,” said Bronwyn Hastings, Vice President Global Technology Partnerships at Google Cloud.

NetApp is a global cloud-led, data-centric software company that empowers organizations to lead with data. The company provides systems, software, and cloud services that enable them to run their applications optimally from data center to cloud.

NetApp is recognized for the company’s achievements in the Google Cloud ecosystem, helping customers build and run applications on Google Cloud quickly and at scale with the right data strategy. NetApp® Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud Platform, jointly developed by NetApp and Google Cloud, provides customers with a powerful, cloud-native, fully-managed file storage service for running applications, analytics, and DevOps in Google Cloud. Whether running enterprise applications or industry-specific workloads in areas such as oil and gas, media and entertainment and life sciences that need high performance and availability and file-based interfaces, Cloud Volumes Service offers NFS and SMB protocol services with throughput that is established in seconds. Over 30 leading global enterprise organizations are already using the service to move workloads to Google Cloud 10 times faster and with eight times more performance than with alternative solutions.

“Google Cloud and NetApp Cloud Volumes helped us move high performance file workloads that we thought would take months or years to refactor,” said Jon Latshaw, vice president, Cloud Services, Cardinal Health.

“We are honored to be recognized by Google Cloud as the 2018 Technology Partner of the Year for Infrastructure,” said Anthony Lye, senior vice president and general manager, Cloud Data Services, NetApp. “It has been an incredible experience to work so closely with the Google Cloud team. The combination of NetApp’s leading cloud data services with Google Cloud’s leadership in application development, analytics, and machine learning fuels business growth by delivering data-rich customer experiences through new application deployments in the cloud.”

“We’re delighted to recognize NetApp as the Google Cloud 2018 Technology Partner of the Year for Infrastructure for their innovative work on behalf of Google Cloud customers,” said Kevin Ichhpurani, corporate vice president, Global Partner Ecosystem at Google Cloud. “Our ecosystem of partners is driving tremendous innovation, and NetApp’s solutions in file services and core infrastructure are a great example. We’re proud to provide this award to NetApp and look forward to continue building together.”

Customers are evolving their data centers to integrate hybrid cloud delivery models for greater agility. As they build out these more flexible architectures, they want to retain the benefits of proven on-premises methods that ensure data efficiencies, protection, and insight. These integrations, however, can create new compatibility issues, particularly with existing applications that depend on file services.

NetApp intends to expand its collaboration with Microsoft to include hybrid cloud data services, built on NetApp’s proven ONTAP software, that will deliver enterprise-grade data visibility and insights, data access and control, and data protection and security for customers moving to Microsoft Azure.

Collaboration areas include developing new cloud data services, based on NetApp ONTAP innovation, that will be offered on the Azure cloud as well as Engineering collaboration to deliver a solution architecture that will speed the migration of enterprise applications to Azure and Azure Stack.

It will also include integration of NetApp’s newly launched FabricPool functionality, which reduces the cost of cold data by automatically tiering it from on-premises to cloud, with Azure Blob Storage. There will also be enablement of Azure as a backup destination for NetApp’s Cloud Control SaaS offering, which provides backup, archive and compliance services to enhance Microsoft Office 365 environments.

“Enterprises depend on Microsoft’s cloud innovation and its broad portfolio of Azure cloud-integrated services to keep them competitive in the fast-moving digital age,” said Anthony Lye, senior vice president, Cloud Business Unit, NetApp. “This new development in our strategic alliance will extend the reach of NetApp’s world-class data services for Azure cloud and support customers as they modernize their businesses and pursue new opportunities for growth.”

Scott Guthrie, executive vice president, Cloud and Enterprise Group, Microsoft Corp., added, “NetApp is a strategic hybrid cloud data services partner for Microsoft Azure and a company whose data solutions are used every day by enterprise customers around the world. Working together we will deliver new solutions that give customers using NetApp and Microsoft Azure even more freedom to build and deploy applications, however they want.”

Both companies share a deep understanding of the needs of global enterprises and offer numerous solutions that help customers maximize the power of their data to achieve competitive advantage. Their collaboration has helped to protect and increase the availability of Microsoft application data assets, and provides a flexible infrastructure to support virtualization and private cloud deployments.

Fadi Kanafani, Regional Director for Middle East and Africa at NetApp says NetApp’s Data Fabric solutions are designed to enable clients to manage data across on-premises and public cloud resources to architect the IT environment that best meets their needs.

How do you see the outlook for Enterprise storage in view of storage consolidation with cloud based options?

When we look at digital transformation that is unfolding now, enterprise storage is taking centre stage in that journey. It is believed that by 2020, data will reach 28 exabytes; driven by IoT, smart cities, M2M etc. A Lot of data is getting accumulated and today it is not just humans that are generating data but machines themselves are generating data through AI and which is consuming more space than ever before. Today all organizations have the need to adopt digital transformation initiatives and that isn’t possible in isolation of storage. With the data that is generated, customers will need analytics to make smarter decisions and to add flexibility to their business. In all of this enterprise storage plays a key part and we see ourselves as a significant player in the enterprise storage space.

What is your proposition for cloud?

We have a very strong value proposition- the Data fabric vision at NetApp. This brings together all the components we have to allow Businesses take control of their data, make it mobile, free them from being locked to one service providers, make use of power of cloud and yet retain data integrity and sovereignty and keep it on premise. NetApp’s Data Fabric solutions are designed to enable clients to manage data across on-premises and public cloud resources to architect the IT environment that best meets their needs. NetApp facilitates digital transformation by delivering unified data management across clouds. With NetApp’s data fabric, organizations can increase efficiency, improve IT responsiveness, and ultimately accelerate innovation.

NetApp is a very strong player with the services providers, providing cloud ONTAP that allows you to manage data on premise, in the public or hybrid cloud, move data from one cloud to another and bring it back as if it were on premises using ONTAP.  So this is something no other competitors can do; we do this with great flexibility and agility and at a minimal cost, if you compare with the rest because you don’t need to rewrite applications when you bring back data from the cloud.

We have strong relationships with AWS, Microsoft Azure etc. Customers can for instance click ONTAP when logged into AWS and within minutes have storage space provisioned. We are also working with local services providers and are looking to introduce service catalogues. We already have relationships with service providers in the region including STC in Saudi, Etisalat here, offering cloud based services like video surveillance as a service, Disaster Recovery as a service, backup as a service, managed services in general. Public cloud customers of STC use NetApp services.

How do you see the shift to the cloud accelerating?

We see faster adoption in current economic conditions. The Oil & Gas sector crisis has impacted other Businesses and that has made them look towards the OPEX model to be able to continue running their Business efficiently at a lesser cost, getting all services as if it were available on premise. So these reasons, good or bad, are encouraging a faster adoption of cloud.

Discuss changes on the partner landscape?

We have a strong partner landscape for traditional sell to customers that have been with us for a long time. However, when we started working with service providers on cloud services, they themselves became a channel for extending our services to their own constituency of customers. We have special programs for supporting that.

Is enterprise flash showing significant traction in various workload deployments?

Today, we at NetApp have been showing tremendous growth. It is in triple figures as adoption has been high. That is also because Flash provides you with higher capacities and efficiency guarantees, for sometimes half of the cost. So customers can do much more with less.

For requirements including DR and backup deployments, the customer will have options to choose what they want to deploy. I hardly see tapes and at times there could be traditional drives. Usually it now always Flash; our value proposition is always Flash.

What are the different Flash propositions?

In terms of Arrays, there are three types. There is Flash for running high IOPS requirements. For instance for Big Data analytics, EFF based on the E series platform. For the typical database requirements, we go with the FAS range of products.       The new NetApp All Flash FAS (AFF) A200, an entry-level all-flash array, delivers enterprise-grade flash performance at a very attractive price point. The new system makes it easy for midsize businesses to move to all flash, and it features a compact 2U chassis design with an internal solid-state drive (SSD) shelf.

When you go to service providers, we have a solutions from SolidFire, a company we acquired recently. The latest version of NetApp SolidFire Element OS storage software lets customers respond to business demands quickly with dynamic adjustments. This solution lets users accommodate mixed workloads on a single storage system, adding capacity and performance with seamless granularity. It is a platform that allows you to manage different workloads and scale very quickly. It also allows you to go out and sign predictable Service Level Agreements such as for instance Platinum level, Gold level, Silver level etc with customers and monetize your relationships with customers based on these predictable SLAs. Because each workload has a different dynamic, we have to go with what solution suits best for the specific workload, opting from the three different flavors of Flash that we offer.

Can ONTAP work with storage that a customer may already have installed from a diifferent vendors?

ONTAP can manage other storage; we typically run a Flex Array that virtualizes other storage available with customers and that allows ONTAP to manage the installed storage. ONTAP software and flash systems give customers a way to bridge existing and emerging IT architectures as they build and evolve their hybrid cloud

If Oil & Gas has been a key focus, did the decline in the segment impact NetApp? How did you look at offsetting this impact?

The Oil & Gas sector has always been close to NetApp’s strategic focus since our presence was established here from 2002 onwards. There has been an impact but we have worked around to augment the gap by looking at requirements of other Businesses and sometimes within the same entity. I do believe it is just a matter of time before the recovery happens and things stabilizes. We are also working a lot more with other segments as I mentioned in the case of the service provider sector and with other public sector entities, with Finance, Education etc. we have diversifies our focus and have been less reliant on the energy sector.