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.

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