In the IT industry today it is nearly impossible not to hear the word cloud dozens of times a day, but many storage administrators treat cloud a four letter word.  The basic tenant for a storage administrator is to ensure an organization’s data is safe and secure.  If the storage administrator makes a mistake bad, bad things happen.  Companies fold, black holes collapse, and sun exploded.  NetApp is trying to change the minds of those storage administrators, and for good reason.  IT organizations are always looking to do more work with lesss money, and cloud storage can’t be ignored as a viable way to do that.

At Storage Field Day 9, NetApp talked a fair amount about how they are embracing cloud storage as key to the industry’s future.  No more a storage vendor affords not to embrace cloud storage,  and NetApp sees it as a key.  Part of the future for NetApp is expanding the hybrid array with sub-LUN tiering to including cloud storage as a replacement for NL-SAS.   This makes perfect sense since the performance characters of a slow SAS drive is not too dissimilar to that of cloud storage.  In addition to this tiering,  it also has a goal of snapshots being truly cross technology.

All in all the direction NetApp having makes their future bright!