NetApp Spot Storage was in the spotlight at this week’s annual NetApp Insight conference. Coined as a “storageless” solution, NetApp Spot Storage enables automated administration of cloud-native, container-based applications.

Spot, a company that NetApp acquired earlier this year for $450 million, created Spot Ocean, a cloud-based serverless offering. Spot Ocean enables what NetApp calls “application-driven architectures” that run microservices-based applications in Kubernetes containers. Already available, NetApp Spot Ocean automates the provisioning of Kubernetes volumes, optimizes performance and manages cost.

NetApp’s Anthony Lye

Performance and cost are key considerations when deploying deeply integrated, cloud-native applications, according to NetApp Senior Vice President Anthony Lye. In the opening keynote session during the NetApp Insight, Lye explained the opportunity for application-driven architectures.

“Customers want more cloud at less cost,” Lye said. “To enable that, customers need application-driven infrastructures. Application-driven infrastructures extend data fabrics Application-driven infrastructures are APIs that continuously optimize compute and storage for price and performance at runtime. When implemented, we save customers up to 90% of their cloud infrastructure costs. And as we help customers prepare for the future, we’ve taken big steps to enable both legacy and cloud native applications to run these APIs.”

Spot’s Amiram Shachar

The launch of NetApp Spot storage will add storageless management to serverless compute services. “Every time you launch compute in the cloud, you get storage,” said Spot’s founder Amiram Shachar, now GM at NetApp. “Spot helps companies who use compute in the cloud, to run the compute in the most optimal and efficient way possible. We basically help the customer choose the right price for the right size for the compute, and also enable this application-driven infrastructure. [When an] application requests what they need from the infrastructure, Spot allows them to do that with a set of APIs.”

Automated Provisioning and Volume Management

Building on the serverless architecture, NetApp Spot Storage will automate provisioning and management of volumes when an application is running. “Storage is intelligently allocated based on application requirements, and then optimized using NetApp’s thin-provisioning, compression and deduping technologies to drive down costs,” according to a post by director of alliances Jonathan Cohen.

In addition to its storageless architecture, Cohen added that NetApp Spot Storage offers a hands-free way to manage storage infrastructure. “Operators define simple storage requests which are then maintained as fully-managed persistent volumes that automatically and dynamically match pod requirements, with the right PV size and performance tier, accessible everywhere in the cluster,” he noted. “Even with little knowledge of storage classes, performance tiers and capacity planning, developers can give their containerized applications exactly the right storage with just a few clicks.”

Global channel chief Chris Lamborn said NetApp Spot storage will ease barriers for customers seeking to deploy cloud-native applications. Besides helping customers automate compute and storage management, it will facilitate development and operations for partners, Lamborn told Channel Futures. NetApp’s systems integrators and managed service provider partners are increasingly seeing customers migrate their applications to cloud-native architectures, he said.

“If they can reduce the manual management for their customers, they’ll make more money from those services,” Lamborn said. “And if they can enable their customers to not have to the spend time, effort and money managing it themselves, they will find it even more beneficial.”

Partners will be able to access NetApp Spot storage from the Spot console, where they can create storage volumes and monitor capacity usage and performance, according to Cohen. It will be available in AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud using NetApp’s ONTAP platform and tools.

According to NetApp, Spot Storage is slated to arrive during its third fiscal quarter, which ends Jan. 31, 2021.