NetApp Intros New CDOT, Data Fabric Services To Partners

NetApp on Monday unveiled training, services and solution kits for channel partners to make it easier for customers to employ NetApp solutions to build public, private and hybrid clouds.

NetApp rolled out the tools -- tied to its Data Fabric and Clustered Data Ontap strategies -- at the NetApp Insight conference, being held this week in Las Vegas.

Although the focus on Clustered Data Ontap and on the NetApp Data Fabric is not the usual kind of news a vendor makes at its biggest annual conference, for NetApp Insight, "it makes sense," said John Woodall, vice president of engineering at Integrated Archive Systems (IAS), a Palo Alto, Calif.-based solution provider and longtime NetApp channel partner. "Data Fabric is the central theme around a lot of what NetApp does. And with partners at the event, it's the right time to focus on it."

[Related: Better High-End Sales, Easing Clustered Data OnTap Transition Lift NetApp]

Clustered Data Ontap, also known as NetApp CDOT, is a scale-out storage solution for virtualized and cloud environments built on clustered NetApp all-flash, hybrid-flash and disk-storage solutions.

Data Fabric, which NetApp introduced at last year's NetApp Insight conference, is NetApp's strategy for leveraging the company's technology, including flash storage and Clustered Data Ontap, to offer a software-defined cloud solution spanning public and private clouds.

NetApp on Monday unveiled training specializations aimed at helping NetApp solution providers take advantage of the company's Data Fabric to get customers ready for the cloud and improve application performance from disk to flash storage to the cloud, including a couple of specialization programs around Clustered Data Ontap.

The first, Clustered Data Ontap Transition Services, targets partners who want to give customers a hand to migrate to CDOT, including installation, configuration and data migration. NetApp distributors Avnet and Arrow are offering the training to their NetApp channel partner communities. The second is the Clustered Data Ontap specialization, designed to assist partners in sizing, selling and architecting CDOT-based solutions.

Also new from NetApp is the company's Data Fabric Solution Essential, which it describes as solution kits for specific workloads that combine software, systems and/or services to speed cloud development.

Included are the Application Acceleration solution kit for quickly deploying four-node clusters to run Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle databases; the OpenStack Solution Kit to help quickly deploy an OpenStack private cloud on a FlexPod converged infrastructure platform; and Snap-to-Cloud DR to help quickly deploy replication for use in disaster recovery, business intelligence, data distribution and development testing needs.

The Data Fabric Solution program is important, Woodall said, as it takes time for customers to understand Data Fabric as it relates to FlexPod.

"We're managing on-premises and cloud data with the same format," he said. "People don't buy Data Fabric for Data Fabric's sake. They buy it for specific workloads, like disaster recovery, replication and certain application stacks. So the message to customers is that partners can deploy NetApp solutions in a consistent manner."

The new enablement services are key as a way to help customers deploy new services, Woodall said.

"We've been helping customers with CDOT services for some time, and this helps broaden these services," he said. "It helps look at what applications stay on-premises or go to the cloud, and helps design the right platform to make the right decision."

PUBLISHED OCT. 12, 2015