Meet NetApp BlueXP

This article was written by Ronen Schwartz at NetApp.

Data is one of the most important assets in the world today. I think the true potential for business growth lies in data and its infinite opportunities. But data also lives in a lot of different places—on premises, in a private cloud, in a public cloud, or multicloud. Data is created very quickly, and it moves just as fast— faster than you can grow your headcount, infrastructure, and budget.

So how do organizations manage and secure this huge amount of data and optimize cost and performance, while empowering their teams to innovate quickly and without barriers?

Well, that is a great question, and one that I face myself as a product leader. Driving agility and innovation, with disparate frameworks and management consoles, plus the ever-changing microeconomic pressures, can make this a very painful situation. And although everyone's situation is unique, I've realized, through talking to our customers and partners, that the origins and reasons for this pain are actually very similar.

The first attempted solution tends to also be similar: try to squeeze more from your current resources and team. But we all know that this isn't a practical or healthy long-term solution. So what's the answer? Just like we lean on technology for agility and innovation, I think the answer is to lean on technology as a solution to this challenge.

Which is why, while working with the hyperscalers and our customers, we have developed NetApp® BlueXP™—a single, unified control plane that delivers a simplified hybrid multicloud experience designed for an evolved cloud state.

You can now register for a free BlueXP account and begin to solve the conflict between the need to run independently and faster versus the need for efficiency, performance optimization, cost control, and security. With BlueXP, different teams can innovate in different clouds, but the organization can still have a single unifying management environment. Built-in AIOps in BlueXP works across on-premises and AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud environments, helping you to optimize and automate. Unparalleled data services can be turned on in BlueXP with just one click, allowing you to do backup, sync, tiering, data governance, and more. And it's all about simplicity. You can go to one place to do all of this with a consistent experience, including the power to leverage an "APIs first" automation capability.

BlueXP benefits

At its core, BlueXP is the next big step in fulfilling our vision to give you the simplicity, security, savings, and sustainability you need to bring your evolved cloud to life.

Simplicity of a unified control plane

The BlueXP console is about as simple as it gets. It brings together your entire data estate as one unified management experience where you can discover, deploy, and manage all your NetApp resources and operations, regardless of the location, on premises or in the cloud.

An intuitive web-based UI and unified APIs with role-based access control allow broad utility across the organization, putting the power of the evolved cloud in the hands of ITOps, CloudOps, DevOps, SecOps, and even FinOps teams with a common framework—all while addressing headcount and skillset constraints that are crushing customers today.

And the BlueXP unified experience enhances our already leading unified storage offerings, both on premises and in the cloud.

Security with integrated protection

BlueXP provides integrated protection of both your data and your infrastructure, giving you the capability to map and secure your data against threats from any source, in one place. True cyber resilience can be achieved because BlueXP combines data protection through its block-level, incremental-forever backup capability (including replication, mirroring, and synchronization options), with advanced cyber resilience technology to protect your entire data estate.

The Ransomware Protection dashboard in BlueXP can be key to your cyber resilience strategy, with integrated AIOps enabling you to see your overall ransomware protection score and highlighting opportunities to strengthen your defenses. BlueXP also offers one-click recommendations to automate resolution of these issues and further improve your score.

Savings through the power of AI and ML and flexible consumption

BlueXP offers integrated AIOps, which means AI-enabled health and status monitoring, alerts, and, most importantly, proactive guidance and suggested actions to avoid further trouble. All of which offload work from your already-strained operations teams.

BlueXP will make your FinOps teams happy, because it lets you control your flexible consumption so you can shift resources to the cloud when needed. Through the integrated Digital Wallet service in BlueXP, you can flex financial commitments as your workloads shift. A great example of that is the NetApp Keystone® Advisor in BlueXP, which helps you determine which clusters should be replaced with Keystone storage as a service, including estimates of the projected service levels and pricing in advance. And BlueXP aligns technology and financial objectives into a common fungible "currency" to make using our services seamless, allowing you to shift certain entitlements between storage and data services as workload conditions change over time.

Sustainability through a hybrid environment

BlueXP can help with sustainability efforts through a consistent view of your hybrid multicloud, complete with power reporting for NetApp systems. This allows you to move critical data to meet business demands while improving your carbon footprint.

You can intelligently observe and analyze your hybrid, multicloud IT estate in terms of energy consumption and impact. In addition, BlueXP helps you proactively take action to improve your power and carbon footprint by identifying workloads that could easily move to the cloud and by assessing cold data and providing integrated tiering of that data to cloud storage.

Learn more

I'm very proud of the NetApp team for thinking big and innovating across our products. BlueXP is your environment to discover, deploy, and manage your data storage infrastructure as well as to use value-added data services across the hybrid multicloud spectrum. All with the flexible consumption parameters required in today's cloud-led environment.

NetApp is introducing elegance and simplicity with the BlueXP experience. It's the only experience so deeply integrated with all the leading cloud providers—and the only one with the power and flexibility of NetApp ONTAP® data management software.

Visit bluexp.netapp.com to register for your BlueXP account, and you can have the power of hybrid multicloud simplicity, AIOps, flexible consumption, and integrated protection at your fingertips. BlueXP is free to use, and most of its capabilities come with integrated free tiers or trial offerings so you can get started today.