NetApp announced yesterday that they are now part of the EVO:RAIL partner program. Although I have been part of the EVO:RAIL team it is not something I would have seen coming. But I can see why they decided to join and find their announcement interesting. I wasn’t planning on writing about it as Mike Laverick already did yesterday, but as I received 8 emails over night on this topic I figured I would share what is going to be included in this package.
NetApp has created a rapid deployment mechanism for theNetApp FAS unit that will be integrated with the NetApp EVO:RAIL appliance. The FAS unit will connect into the same top of rack switch that the EVO:RAIL appliance will connect into. We have created a link and launch capability that NetApp can leverage from within the EVO:RAIL configuration engine to rapidly configure/integrate the FAS unit with the EVO:RAIL appliance.
Yes, this does mean that that 2U hyper-converged appliance which includes vSphere, VSAN and LogInsight now also will include a FAS unit (FAS 2500 judging by NetApp’s website?) in NetApp’s case. Now this is not the first time I have seen vendors adding hardware to the VMware EVO:RAIL offering, but in most other cases physical switches were included. I think this is a very interesting play though, and am looking forward to see how these two products will be integrated. From a configuration perspective I can envision what this would look like, but from a management point of view that will be a bit more challenging and may take some more time. With cool features like Virtual Volumes coming out in the near future this could be a nice way of providing a customer multiple types of storage in a seamless way.