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NetApp Solutions

Hybrid cloud solution

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A modern enterprise data center is a hybrid cloud that connects multiple distributed infrastructure environments through a continuous data management plane with a consistent operating model, on premises and/or in multiple public clouds. To get the most out of a hybrid cloud, you must be able to seamlessly move data between your on-premises and multi-cloud environments without the need for any data conversions or application refactoring.

Customers have indicated that they start their hybrid cloud journey either by moving secondary storage to the cloud for use cases such as data protection or by moving less business-critical workloads such as application development and DevOps to the cloud. They then move on to more critical workloads. Web and content hosting, DevOps and application development, databases, analytics, and containerized apps are among the most popular hybrid-cloud workloads. The complexity, cost, and risks of enterprise AI projects have historically hindered AI adoption from experimental stage to production.

With a NetApp hybrid-cloud solution, customers benefit from integrated security, data governance, and compliance tools with a single control panel for data and workflow management across distributed environments, while optimizing the total cost of ownership based on their consumption. The following figure is an example solution of a cloud service partner tasked with providing multi-cloud connectivity for customers' big-data-analytics data.

Example solution of a cloud service partner.

In this scenario, IoT data received in AWS from different sources is stored in a central location in NetApp Private Storage (NPS). The NPS storage is connected to Spark or Hadoop clusters located in AWS and Azure enabling big-data-analytics applications running in multiple clouds accessing the same data. The main requirements and challenges for this use case include the following:

  • Customers want to run analytics jobs on the same data using multiple clouds.

  • Data must be received from different sources such as on-premises and cloud environments through different sensors and hubs.

  • The solution must be efficient and cost effective.

  • The main challenge is to build a cost-effective and efficient solution that delivers hybrid analytics services between different on-premises and cloud environments.

Our data protection and multicloud connectivity solution resolves the pain point of having cloud analytics applications across multiple hyperscalers. As shown in the figure above, data from sensors is streamed and ingested into the AWS Spark cluster through Kafka. The data is stored in an NFS share residing in NPS, which is located outside of the cloud provider within an Equinix data center.

Because NetApp NPS is connected to Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure through Direct Connect and Express Route connections respectively, customers can leverage the In-Place Analytics Module to access the data from both Amazon and AWS analytics clusters. Consequently, because both on-premises and NPS storage runs ONTAP software, SnapMirror can mirror the NPS data into the on-premises cluster, providing hybrid cloud analytics across on-premises and multiple clouds.

For the best performance, NetApp typically recommends using multiple network interfaces and direct connection or express routes to access the data from cloud instances. We have other data mover solutions including XCP and BlueXP Copy and Sync to help customers build application-aware, secure, and cost-effective hybrid-cloud Spark clusters.