For more than a decade, NetApp and VMware, recently acquired by Broadcom Inc., have collaborated to ensure the success of their joint customers and help them unlock the full value of their VMware investments. During that time, NetApp has been a key engineering design partner with VMware and is continuing to drive innovation in highly available, scalable and performant storage as a design partner for its Next-Generation vSphere Virtual Volumes (vVols). Now, NetApp is announcing new capabilities that will enable joint customers to run their VMware deployments more efficiently.

“NetApp and Broadcom are working together to take the uncertainty out of hybrid cloud environments,” said Jonsi Stefansson, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at NetApp. “More than 20,000 customers rely on NetApp to support their VMware workloads. NetApp's continued close collaboration with Broadcom following the acquisition of VMware ensures our solutions seamlessly interoperate so our mutual customers can leverage a single intelligent data infrastructure to operate their VMware workloads more efficiently.”

NetApp is helping optimize costs, simplify operations, and increase flexibility for customers running VMware environments by offering:

· Expanded Support for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF): NetApp and Broadcom customers will now be able to simplify their VCF hybrid cloud environments by using NetApp ONTAP® software for all storage requirements, including standard and consolidated architectures. The latest release of ONTAP Tools for VMware (OTV) will support SnapMirror® active sync to provide symmetric active-active data replication capabilities for NetApp storage systems running VMware workloads. SnapMirror active sync allows customers to operate more efficiently by offloading data protection from their virtualized compute and improving data availability.
· New Capabilities for Azure VMware Solution (AVS): To support customers that are extending or migrating their vSphere workloads to the cloud, customers can now leverage Spot Eco by NetApp with AVS reserved instances to get the most value out of their deployments. Using Spot Eco to manage AVS reserved instances while also using Azure NetApp Files to offload data storage can reduce compute costs significantly.
· Enhanced VM Optimization Features for NetApp Cloud Insights: NetApp is introducing Cloud Insights VM Optimization, expanding its comprehensive solution for optimizing virtual environments, including VMware. Cloud Insights VM Optimization will give customers tools to reduce costs by increasing VM density, run storage at the best price-to-performance ratio for their environment, and monitor their entire environment to ensure availability, performance, and adherence to configuration best practices across the entire stack. To help customers optimize the compute, memory and storage resources of their VMware environments, NetApp is also offering customers a free 30-day trial of Cloud Insights to most cost-effectively migrate to the new VMware software subscriptions.

These offerings follow last month’s release of enhancements to NetApp BlueXP™ disaster recovery service, which provides guided workflows to design and execute automated disaster recovery plans for VMware workloads across hybrid cloud environments with newly added support for VMFS datastores.

“As organizations modernize infrastructure with VMware Cloud Foundation, they want to know that the services upon which they rely from industry-leaders such as NetApp will continue to work seamlessly and deliver the value they have come to expect,” said Paul Turner, Vice President of Products, VCF Division at Broadcom. “Having NetApp as a close collaborator helps our mutual customers deploy innovative data and storage services on top of their private cloud platform, and ensure they are getting the most value out of their VMware environments.”

“We have made Microsoft Azure the cloud of choice for VMware environments and offer fast and cost-effective solutions enabling many customers to move their VMware workloads to the cloud,” said Brett Tanzer, Vice President of Product Management at Microsoft. “As VMware customers navigate changes to operating virtualized environments, we have given our customers a way to lock in secure and predictable pricing over multiple years. NetApp's data management and cloud observability capabilities help our customers ensure those deployments are delivering the return on investment they need.”

“In an ever more complicated world of cloud, data, and infrastructure operations, IT teams are increasingly looking for holistic platforms over point solutions,” said Scott Sinclair, Practice Director, Enterprise Strategy Group. “These joint updates from NetApp and Broadcom enable customers to use NetApp’s intelligent data infrastructure to consolidate multiple data operations onto a single platform with industry-leading data management and CloudOps capabilities. That will help customers drive greater operational and infrastructure efficiencies that reduce the total cost of ownership for their VMware investments.”