NetApp has said it will provide storage as a service through its Keystone subscription offering, with arrays deployed in Equinix colocation centers in an Equinix Metal arrangement.
Equinix Metal is comprised of physical servers and arrays made available to customers as a service. Equinix has offered Pure arrays since 2021. Equinix colocation centers are located near public cloud datacenters for fast interconnection. Keystone is NetApp’s storage subscription service. NetApp Storage on Equinix Metal combines Equinix’s colos with NetApp arrays and Keystone billing so customers can store and access data on NetApp arrays without installing, managing and operating the necessary infrastructure in their own datacenters.
NetApp’s Sandeep Singh, SVP and GM for enterprise storage, said organizations can “move more workload types to the hybrid multicloud more easily and in greater numbers than ever before,” and claimed NetApp was a “leader in delivering native cloud and first-party solutions on all three major public clouds that provide a unified hybrid multi cloud experience for customers.”
The NetApp-Equinix deal provides a single-tenant environment, built to meet customer capacity and performance requirements, delivered as part of a compute, network and storage (file, block, and object) stack to run customer applications, under a single contract and support mechanism. There is an automated Equinix provisioning platform and customers can scale storage resources up and down as needs change.
NetApp says that, when its storage is combined with Equinix Metal’s high-performance bare metal servers, users experience fast data access, low latency, and the ability to handle the most demanding workloads, including AI.
It is a hybrid multi-cloud offering because Equinix Metal colos have connectivity to all major public cloud environments. This means NetApp cloud services such as Cloud Volumes ONTAP and NetApp first-party services, AWS FSx for ONTAP, Azure NetApp Files, and Google Cloud NetApp Volumes can be added to NetApp Storage on Equinix Metal.
Equinix had a total of 236 International Business Exchange (IBX) colo datacenters located around the world at the end of last year, and now 26 of them are Metal locations.
NetApp Storage on Equinix Metal is a first-party service offered through Equinix. Those interested can look at the NetApp Storage on Equinix Metal web page.
