GCP – Accelerate your Google Cloud transformation with new NetApp solutions

Today’s enterprises require agility and adaptability to meet business and customer needs. For many businesses, that’s come to mean transitioning to cloud services. In fact, an estimated 85% of organizations have a majority of their workloads in the cloud¹, including virtual desktops, Windows-based workloads, critical SAP applications, or backup and disaster recovery solutions. 

Since 2018, Google Cloud and NetApp have collaborated to create a portfolio of solutions that make it easier to migrate and run enterprise workloads in the cloud. Through our partnership, you can unlock the power of your data with tightly integrated, enterprise-class solutions that are optimized for Google Cloud. 

“Customers are looking to unlock the benefits of cloud technologies through simplified migration and deployment so they can focus on serving the needs of their customers,” said Jason McKinney, WW Vice President, Public Cloud Sales, NetApp. “The partnership enables customers to benefit from Google Cloud’s leading infrastructure services alongside NetApp’s data services to quickly migrate and run critical business applications, and garner new insights from cloud services to build new services for their customers.” 

As our partnership has progressed, we’ve created solutions for additional industries and use cases, and are continuously adding new services to our joint offerings, all with the goal of making it easier to migrate critical apps to the cloud and run them effectively. For example, customers such as Activision Blizzard were able to extend their on-prem infrastructure to Google Cloud within days and leverage NetApp to scale those applications worldwide to meet the performance requirements to deliver an optimal user experience for 300M+ gamers around the world.

Let us show you what you can accomplish with NetApp and Google Cloud today. 

Manage your data more effectively 

NetApp delivers enterprise-class storage management capabilities for Google Cloud, including out-of-the-box capabilities such as data protection, storage efficiency, cloning, tiering, storage hybridity, and more—all with the scale, availability, security, and performance you need for an array of enterprise workloads. You can choose from two leading offerings:

• NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is a software-only storage solution that runs ONTAP data management software on Compute Engine instances, ideal for data protection and data governance needs.

• NetApp Cloud Volumes Service offers managed NFS and SMB services that can be deployed right from the Google Cloud Marketplace, managed in the Google Cloud console, and paid for as part of your Google Cloud bill. 

NetApp’s services can be used to optimize a plethora of applications in Google Cloud, lowering cost and risk while optimizing performance and productivity. Here’s a quick rundown of key use cases: 

Migrate SAP faster 

Businesses are faced with a complex and potentially costly move to S/4HANA as SAP begins winding down support for SAP ERP on anyDB in 2027. NetApp’s services enable you to complete your SAP deployments and migrations to Google Cloud quickly and cost effectively, while enabling higher reliability and lower risk. 

Customers are starting to benefit from the combined power of NetApp and Google Cloud for SAP workload migration, noted Geoff Tudor, WW Head of Google Cloud Solutions, NetApp. “We’ve doubled our SAP customers on Google Cloud in the last month, as more enterprises are migrating their SAP workload to Google Cloud and using Cloud Volumes to achieve 99.99% reliability and data protection for these mission critical applications.” 

Here are a few of the benefits you can expect from using NetApp for your SAP deployment on Google Cloud: 

• Shrink deployment times by as much as 40%¹

• Select service levels dynamically for worry-free deployment

• Run HANA in the cloud with sub-millisecond latency, high IOPs, and high throughput storage

• Dramatically reduce complexity and management overhead for shared files

• Accelerate protection and application development and testing with NetApp Snapshot and cloning technology

Migrate and modernize Windows workloads

Companies hoping to modernize their Windows workloads to reap the benefits of cloud computing recognize the challenges involved. Managing Windows IaaS environments in the cloud is complex and can result in inefficient usage of server and storage resources. Users often experience data availability issues, poor performance, and slow recovery times. 

NetApp and Google Cloud work together to provide greater flexibility with Windows deployments, including the ability to easily size volumes up or down and change performance tiers dynamically. You can provision new volumes in seconds, and simplify Windows operations. 

Windows Server users leveraging NetApp on Google Cloud can expect to see results such as³:

• 70% cloud infrastructure savings: Save time and money with Cloud Volumes over using standard Windows instances for file shares.

• 90% reduction in snapshot times: Improve data availability and reduce snapshot times from hours to minutes.

• 99.9% uptime: Guaranteed service level monitoring 24/7 improves customer experience.

Simplify backup and disaster recovery

To help you prevent downtime, NetApp offers a range of innovative data protection capabilities. The Cloud Volumes ONTAP high availability (HA) configuration for Google Cloud meets the highest service level agreement and guarantees an RPO (recovery point objective) of 0 and an RTO (recovery time objective) of less than 60 seconds while meeting strict compliance and data integrity requirements. With HA enabled, all data volumes can be synchronously mirrored across multiple locations, with operations only completing after all the information has been written to each node. This allows different high availability scenarios and modes of operation such as active-active, where data can be written to either node, or active-passive, where one of the nodes stays in standby and only serves out reads. 

NetApp also recently announced three new data protection and high availability features for Cloud Volumes Service, including:

• Integrated backup to Cloud Storage: Easily backup data from Cloud Volumes Service to Google’s Cloud Storage.

• Volume replication: Configure volume replication between two different regions, so data is available across regions for disaster-recovery purposes or to make copies for developers, testing or analytics. 

• Regional high-availability with zone-redundant volumes: Enable high availability at the regional level so if one zone goes down in that region, service will fail over to another zone with zero RPO.

Google Cloud and NetApp continue to work together to make cloud migration and digital transformation a reality for even the most complex enterprise ecosystems, and we continue to add new features and capabilities all the time. Stay tuned for more good news from our partnership as we continue to move forward with our mutual customers. 

To learn more about the ways in which Google Cloud and NetApp work together to bring you greater value, read NetApp’s latest blog and visit cloud.google.com/netapp.

^{1. 2020 Cloud Infrastructure Report | AllCloud
2. Source: NetApp, SAP Customers Are Getting to Market Faster with Cloud Volumes for Google Cloud.
3. Source: NetApp, Top 5 reasons to run Windows workloads on Google Cloud.}