“We’re seeing a change in the way that people buy, run, consume and manage infrastructures,” says Matt Watts, Global Chief Evangelist for NetApp, speaking at CDW’s BTEX 2020 virtual event. “As we move towards platform as a service (PaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS) or software as a service (SaaS), it will become increasingly difficult for you to buy and install software because the companies that are developing this software don’t want to sell it to you – they want to sell you a subscription to it.”
The rapid evolution of technology
Noting the substantial increase in storage capacity for solid-state drives over the past few years, Watts mentions that if you’re procuring technology over a three to five-year write-down, “After two years, your technology is starting to become out of date. After three years, it’s probably starting to hold you back. And in years four or five, it’s probably almost a liability.” This is going to force IT to think differently about how they procure technology, while pushing more businesses to the cloud.
“The easiest way not to worry about how to keep up with the relentless pace of technological change is to make it somebody else’s problem. In the cloud it truly is somebody else’s problem.”
How NetApp aligns with the transition to the cloud
“We want to help companies get more from the cloud,” says Watts. “The cloud can enable us to do some incredible things, but there are things that it doesn’t do, and that’s where we see a real opportunity for NetApp.”
“It’s about continuous optimization. How do we understand what we have, where we have it, whether on premises, across multiple different clouds, and understand what does it look like?” Watts says these things are behind the data fabric strategy that NetApp has been following since 2014.
3 core tenets of NetApp’s data fabric strategy
Freedom of choice: Giving you the ability to do what you need to do today, but not locking you into a path that you can’t deviate from in the future.
Simplicity: Bringing consistent data services, encryption and protection across on-premises and different clouds.
Protection: How do we manage data and applications in an increasingly dispersed nature?
“We want to have the right endpoints with the right characteristics that allow us to bring the best piece of technology to solve customers’ workloads,” says Watts. “Do you want to be on premises today, hybrid tomorrow, and fully cloud in the future?” NetApp is focused on allowing you to do that at your own pace.
To learn more about NetApp solutions, please visit CDW.ca/NetApp. And be sure to bookmark this page for more coverage of BTEX 2020.
