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NetApp on Wednesday unveiled a new relationship with Amazon Web Services that allows customers to establish a dedicated network connection between NetApp storage systems in a co-location center and the Amazon cloud through the AWS Direct Connect service.
The combined solution, called NetApp Private Storage for AWS, was introduced at the Amazon re:Invent partner conference, held this week in Las Vegas.
NetApp customers can arrange for any NetApp FAS-series or V-series storage arrays to be sited in an Amazon-certified co-location center and connected via AWS Direct Connect to make those arrays' capacity available for use with AWS services, said Tom Shields, product marketing manager for NetApp.
[Related: AWS' New Gateway-Cached Volumes Brings Primary Storage To Public Clouds]
"Customers get high-performance integration between NetApp storage and EC2 and/or S3 using AWS Direct Connect," Shields said. "It's the customer's data, whether it's on NetApp storage or on the Amazon Web Services cloud. AWS Direct Connect allows customers to use their NetApp storage as if it were a part of the Amazon Web Services stack."
AWS Direct Connect allows customers to establish a dedicated network connection between their network and one of the AWS Direct Connect locations.
The dedicated connection can be partitioned into multiple virtual interfaces, allowing it to be used to access public resources such as objects stored in Amazon S3 and private resources such as Amazon EC2 instances running within an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), all while keeping the public and private environments separate, according to Amazon.
Tying NetApp storage with AWS services gives customers the best of both worlds, Shields said.
"Our customers love the flexibility and the time-to-market advantage of the cloud," he said. "But there are concerns about data availability, security and compliance. And, performance is a concern. And, customers are concerned about how data is migrated between public and private clouds."
There are three main areas where customer will benefit from NetApp Private Storage, Shields said.
The first is the ability to leverage the capabilities of the cloud to improve the performance of EC2 instances or reduce the cost of big data or database processing, all while ensuring that the data meets compliance regulations.
NEXT: Use Cases For NetApp Private Storage
