How We Use the NetApp Data Fabric to Innovate with Active IQ

We all know that the volume of data is growing exponentially. I find this to be especially true in my role on the Active IQ engineering team. Active IQ is NetApp’s suite of cloud services that help customers derive actionable insights on how to avoid disruptions and optimize their modern data center. It is included with a customer’s NetApp Support Contract.

To keep up with the demands of our users and stay ahead of the competition, we need to store and process massive amounts of data every single day. This data is incredibly diverse, and comes in from a wide variety of NetApp products around the globe—200B telemetry points daily, to be specific. Getting the most value out of this data is the key to success for our customers. We use the cloud to help us store, process, and analyze all that data much more effectively than we could with our on-premises infrastructure. We get massive amounts of compute and storage on demand to help us be more agile and innovative in bringing new Active IQ capabilities to market faster.

To eliminate the risk of creating a collection of cloud silos—with no interconnection or ability to move data to where it will produce the most value—we have created a unified ecosystem using the NetApp Data Fabric. With it, we deliver the speed and agility our customers expect without being locked into any one infrastructure, whether that’s on-premises, in the public cloud, or in a colo.

We’re seeing this in action today with the development of Active IQ. We’re leveraging new technologies from the cloud to bring new and innovative Active IQ services to market in a few months rather than developing them from scratch.

Here are a few of the features we’ve developed using the Data Fabric and the cloud:

• A voice activation feature for the Active IQ mobile app that help sales teams and customers get instant access to insights with voice commands
• Out-of-the-box machine learning (ML) models for providing actionable intelligence from data
• Advanced features for Notifications and Active IQ API services
• Auto-scaling Active IQ services based on user load
• Active IQ services that can be leveraged through APIs by customers

Our hybrid, multicloud Active IQ platform is built on a variety of NetApp products, including AFF for real-time processing, E-Series systems for batch processing, as well as StorageGRID Webscale for long-term data archiving and retention. With the Data Fabric, we can deploy new services on demand by moving data to where it makes the most sense for each workload. NetApp has decades worth of telemetry data that is used in developing and honing NetApp products. In order to optimize storage and contain costs, we are constantly balancing cold data from our AFF hot storage to StorageGRID cold archive, something that would not have been possible without the NetApp Data Fabric.

Success Secrets: How you can Pass NetApp Certification Exams in first attempt

Plan the Right First Step to the Cloud with NetApp Cloud Advisor

Get Visibility Into Your Whole Environment

With Cloud Advisor you can plan your move at your own pace, from one application to your entire footprint across the globe. Cloud Advisor pulls data from NetApp’s ActiveIQ data lake allowing you to see relevant information about your storage environment across all of your datacenters without having to run a lengthy discovery process.

Zero In on the Right Data

Cloud Advisor provides easy to use filters to uncover which types of application data are in use by site, feature usage, and capacity.  Granular data reporting and selection means that you can target the right data to move to the cloud and avoid mistakes.  Making sense of the application data, where it currently is and where it could go is an important part of completing the picture of a cloud journey.

Project Room to View and Share

You can empower your cloud strategy and application teams to plan their transitions. Because you can filter and search for data associated with specific applications, your teams can evaluate the right applications for the right cloud.  Utilize the project room to manage multiple assessments, and share them with colleagues to understand exactly which applications are in scope for movement to cloud.

Choose the Right Landing Spot

With Cloud Advisor, you can select which cloud regions make sense for your data based on features, proximity and data governance needs. Cloud Advisor includes intelligence about public cloud providers and where services are available so you can model the right place for your data. We offer tradeoffs and considerations for both a NetApp storage or cloud storage approach.

Understanding Cost and Time

Move your data with confidence by using our estimated cost analysis and migration duration metrics. Cloud Advisor pulls up to date costs for the type of storage you want to consider in the hyperscaler cloud of your choice. You can compare the costs to move your data to NetApp Cloud Volumes Service or to another cloud target and see in real time what your estimated costs would be.

Success Secrets: How you can Pass NetApp Certification Exams in first attempt