NetApp INSIGHT 2024 | Pravjit Tiwana, Cloud Operations

Clips
News
More from NetApp INSIGHT 2024

Pravjit Tiwana

CTO & SVP - Cloud Storage & Services Business Unit,

NetApp

How NetApp’s strategic cloud partnerships drive enterprise flexibility and infrastructure control

NetApp Inc. is rethinking its strategic positioning in enterprise storage. Beyond just hardware, the company is embracing the cloud, through hyperscaler partnerships, in ways that meet the needs of a rapidly evolving tech landscape. NetApp’s Pravjit Tiwana discusses hyperscaler partnerships with theCUBE.“Thanks to all three major hyperscaler partners in Amazon, Microsoft and Google, we are in more than 100 regions now,” said Pravjit Tiwana (pictured), senior vice president and general manager of the Cloud Storage Business Unit at NetApp. “The global availability; if a customer needs data in a local sovereign or wants an air gap, all those capabilities are there

play_circle_outline NetApp's strategic partnerships with cloud providers transforming businesses

play_circle_outline Unlocking Global Cloud Potential: Native Services Offer Unique Position for Security, Compliance, AI Capabilities

play_circle_outline Bringing AI to data without moving it, following evolving industry standards

play_circle_outline Price performance optimization, co-engineering with hyperscalers, lowering costs

Info
Transcript

Pravjit Tiwana, Cloud Operations

Pravjit Tiwana

CTO & SVP - Cloud Storage & Services Business Unit, NetApp

NetApp's partnerships with cloud providers are reshaping business operations by offering efficiency and innovation. As the only enterprise storage vendor with services across major cloud providers, NetApp provides global availability, security enhancements, compliance, and access to AI capabilities for customers. The company focuses on simplifying data management, data migration, and operations in a hybrid cloud environment. By embracing AI standards and working on price-performance optimization, NetApp aims to meet customers' specific needs and lower costs t... Read more

explore Keep Exploring

What is NetApp's unique position in leveraging strategic partnerships with cloud providers to transform the way businesses operate? add

What are the benefits of NetApp being the only enterprise storage vendor with native services across all major cloud providers in terms of what it offers to customers? add

What are some examples of tools available for Azure NetApp files and Google Cloud NetApp volumes that allow customers to bring their own LLM models to use against their proprietary data sets without needing to move the data? add

What is one of the core dimensions of what the organization is doing in cloud storage sources and what are some examples of investments and strategies in place to optimize price performance for customers? add

bolt Powered by CUBE AI

Pravjit Tiwana, Cloud Operations

search

Rebecca Knight

>> Good afternoon everyone, and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of NetApp Insight 2024 here in Las Vegas at the MGM. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Rob Strache. Rob, a message that's coming loud and clear is that NetApp's strategic partnerships with cloud providers is really transforming the way businesses get work done and allows for greater efficiency and innovation. It's exciting.

>> Yeah, no, I mean, having been at AWS when FSX ONTAP was launched there, I can tell you it took off. It was a great way to go and I think that people don't just have their data in one place. They want to leverage services that are at all of the different hyperscalers, and NetApp really has a very unique position in that.

Rebecca Knight

>> Well, here to tell us more is Pavjit Tawana. He is the SVP and GM of cloud operations. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE.

>> Thank you so much for having me here.

Rebecca Knight

>> So as we were saying, NetApp is the only enterprise storage vendor with native services across all major cloud providers. This is a unique position and how does it benefit NetApp in terms of what it offers to customers?

>> See, the way we look into it is it creates a win-win for both our customers, right? ONTAP has a history of building lot of good storage capabilities over the last two decades. Be it about the protocols or be it all the unified storage or be it all the data protection or security capabilities, which we have built, and then we couple it with the advantages which come from hyperscalers, right? We get global availability. Now thanks to our all three major hyperscaler partners and Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, we are in a hundred plus regions now. So the global availability, if a customer needs data in a local sovereign or they want an air gap, all those capabilities are there. Then on top of that, they also get a lot of things around the security which hyperscaler partners are investing in. For example, this year we worked with Microsoft for more than six months as part of their strategic security future investments and our developers have been co-working with them. So we are together raising the bar on security, getting the best from the hyperscaler side of the things, best from ONTAP side. Same thing goes around compliances, same thing goes around... And the more interesting thing is hyperscalers have a lot of these other sources also available, especially in AI, like what you have with Bedrock and Amazon or Vortex AI in Google, right? Our customers are able to get all those capabilities now natively available as part of the first party service. So it's a combination of all the goodness which we have both on the ONTAP side and also on a hyperscaler partners, which really is powerful for our customers. And we being the first party, customers get the same experience, same be it on billing, be it on onboarding, be it on the GTM motion, beat in consumption through consoles, API, SDK, CLI. So it creates a very powerful narrative for customers to solve and accelerate their business problems.

>> Yeah, no, I think again, both of us having been around the cloud block, I guess you could say, and I don't mean block storage, but I mean when you start to look at it, I think it's a really fun position that you're in here because again, you're looking at it, there's competition because they have their own services and things like that. But you're bringing a very unique set of things to customers, that hybrid nature that really... I mean, again, they all try to do it and both of us were there probably trying to build the same stuff. And when you start to look at it, you take a step back. It really is about these organizations we heard from J&J about how they're using it for their AI and do you see that as the uniqueness and that they're embracing NetApp in that way because of that hybrid nature?

>> Yeah. The good thing is all the three hyperscalers, same as NetApp, they're also very customer-obsessed, right? Every solution which is out there or every capability which is out there is based on what they're hearing from their customers, and our customers have trusted with us for storage needs for more than two decades at this point. So they are also expecting same kind of experience, same kind of trust, same kind of security, same kind of richness in cloud, and that's how when our hyperscaler partners are listening to those customers and doing that thing. So we don't see it as a competition or anything, it's purely based on the customer choices that they're picking up sources and storage is one of those things also. It takes a long time to take it in terms of the capabilities, the operational maturity, the security, governance, compliance. There is no compression algorithm to things like scale and all those kinds of things. We have those two decades of experience building those for our customers and our joint customers between hyperscalers and us are really enjoying that capabilities being available in the cloud also.

Rebecca Knight

>> So NetApp is a company with a robust portfolio of hardware, and yet there is NetApp is also encouraging and supporting customers using data in the cloud. So what is the impetus for that?

>> Sure. We see us as an intelligent data infrastructure company. We want to be at all the places where the data is, right? Yes, in certain use cases where enterprise use cases, the hardware-driven approach is there, which also is complemented with a lot of software engineering work, which we have done and build the whole on tap layer and so on. So from that perspective, the reason we are in hyperscalers is because our customers are asking for that. It's the new reality. The data is at multiple places. Cloud is one of the main components of where the data lives and wherever the data lives, we want to bring that richness of what we have built.

Rebecca Knight

>> NetApp is where the data are.

>> Yes. Exactly.

Rebecca Knight

>> And I think it made a lot of sense, and we had George on last night. We had Krish on earlier today. We've had a number of people and it's about bringing the AI to the data in a lot of cases, whatever that means to the end customer. Like you said, working backwards from the customers and looking around the corner to see where they want to go next and being right about that. I think when you look at that, I think again, the customers have been coming back to this, help us manage this in a hybrid cloud manner. How do you see NetApp really helping manage the data at scale in this hybrid manner?

Rebecca Knight

>> Yes, so we have lots and lots of customers who are either only on cloud storage or they are in hybrid setup. Two out of the five customers which we onboard today, they are actually set up in the hybrid setup. So they have their data on the on-premise. And so where we really shine is around multiple things, especially around if you look into it, how customer journey starts with into the cloud is, right? Usually they start with scenarios like disaster recovery or they want an instant elasticity in the cloud or they want instant capacity in the cloud, those kind of things. And in the fullness of time they start moving their workloads over to the cloud. Some companies might move one or two, some might move tens of them. It depends upon their choices. So where we shine is are the capabilities which we have built around data migration, data mobility, the whole aspect of our blue XP where you can use it from multi-cloud setup and get a similar familiar experience, which you do to manage one cloud or enterprise and so on. So that's where our customers really like us. And as I said before that the trust which they have in that app storage system is extended over to the hyperscaler clouds also.

>> And it's also about the simplicity, right? I mean, because again, both of us know how... I've configured a lot of cloud storage in my life and having been at NetApp as well, I think it's always been a focus of simplicity as well.

>> Yes, the frictionless experience and simplicity of migration, deployment, even operations is very, very important. We earlier this year launched Blue XP Workload Factory, which is predominantly to make things simpler. Like, hey, when you migrate your VMware workload or you migrate your SQL server or Oracle workloads, how do you make it very simple and frictionless for customer and at the same time give the cost efficiency as well as adherence to the cloud best practices and best architectures and so on. Same thing is what we are doing in AI. If you see, we are integrated with say Amazon Bedrock to provide the LLM models over to if you have data stored in FSX for ONTAP, and we are looking into similar things for doing for Vortex AI and BigQuery and Google and Azure One Lake and all the Azure AI analytics services. The idea there is there is so much complexity when it comes to managing your RAG-based infrastructures to building these apps in low-code, no-code environments. That's where we are bringing lots of simplicity working with our partners. And you're absolutely right, it's about frictionless experience. It's about scale, it is about security, it is about experience which you can really enjoy.

Rebecca Knight

>> Well, you mentioned best practices for cloud. I imagine that the best practices for AI are still being written. In fact, you are helping to write them. So how are you building the plane as you're flying it in terms of making sure that you are doing things correctly for business-wise, but also ethically, responsibly and sustainably?

Rebecca Knight

>> Yes. So we have lots of things, right? For instance, I'll start with JNI toolkit, which we have for our Azure NetApp files and Google Cloud NetApp volumes. The idea behind there is that hey, you can bring your own LLM models and use it against your proprietary data set without the need to moving the data anywhere. So this is a way in which customers can play with it, learn with it, and make sure that they are very sure about that, hey, we are meeting the compliance, the data leakage problems and those kind of things. But you're absolutely right. Also, AI is still in early stages. This reminds me of when I started on the cloud journey 10, 15 years back. We are kind of in a similar kind of paradigms are coming, standards are being set, hybrid, on-prem, cloud, all those things are very similar paradigms from that perspective. I think the investments which we are doing at NetApp or things like data classification and making sure our core principle in AI is that you don't have to move data anywhere. We want to bring AI to you so that the problem starts when you start creating silos of data and then you don't know suddenly what is under what governance, what compliance and so on. So we are really, really laser-focused that we don't get into that problem with AI and that's why if you see our full strategy around AI is how do you bring AI to the data without the need to moving data, but the standard will keep on evolving as an industry. We are part of that industry and the idea here is to be quick to respond to those and embrace those standards.

>> So I think one of the things I found interesting, again, great keynote by the way this morning. I thought it was really fascinating and I think when Harv came back on and was talking to Samit around GCP and some of the stuff that you're doing with them that is pretty unique around their GDC and things of that nature and how you're also lowering costs for people, that would seem like this is great co-engineering that has to happen. Talk to that kind of part of the relationship.

>> Yes. So price performance optimization is one of our core dimensions of what we are doing in our cloud storage sources. As I said in the keynote, also, we don't want to be in a situation where cost is the reason for not using our hyperscaler sources. We are doing tons and tons of investments. There are all the things which are covered in Keynote around reserve capacity or private pricing, or especially our auto-tiering, which gives really, really large savings to customers back and the different service plans which we have based on your workload profiles. Where we and hyperscalers are working together is also we launched FlexService in Google, which is a software-defined tier, which uses the native infrastructure available from Google itself. So we are working together on making sure we get optimizations in terms of price and performance from both side of the spectrum, from our software layer as well as their infrastructure, and we also have our own flashers deployed in the data center. So this is among the top three priorities for our organization to make sure that we get the best price performance to our customers.

>> Okay. Sorry, and I just following up on that because you also had Matt Wood last night on, and I want to give equal airtime to two of my friends. And Matt talking about how, like you said, Bedrock and bringing the AI and really being a first-class citizen in there. I mean, you're already or first party. Do you see that as really, to your point, working backwards from the customers? The customers are driving those types of integrations because they rely on the security of NetApp and the governance that they have over it to then tie into using those tooling that-

>> Absolutely right. I think since you brought AWS, right? Like AWS is known for embracing this off, like customers owning pretty much all of the roadmap. I think we embrace the same sentiment and same mindset. So we are hearing from customers that, hey, the customers told us that, hey, we want right now the deployment of RAG infrastructure is complex. That's why in our Blue XP Workload Factory for JNI, we made it so simple because now with the only few clicks you can deploy or hold RAG infrastructure. Same thing they're saying that, hey, there are a lot of good foundational models available in Bedrock. How do we build really RAG rich applications which use the proprietary data, which they have in FSX for ONTAP? And that's why we had that integration. And in fullness of time means we do see wherever customers tell us that, hey, whatever analytics and AI capabilities they want to use, you do want to provide that to them.

Rebecca Knight

>> Excellent. A great note to end on. Pavjit, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Rebecca Knight

>> Thank you for having me.

Rebecca Knight

>> I'm Rebecca Knight for Rob Strache. Keep it right here on theCUBE for more of our coverage of NetApp Insight 2024. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise tech news and analysis.