NetApp India’s become a microcosm of global operations

BENGALURU: NetApp India managing director Deepak Visweswaraiah says the company’s centre of excellence (CoE) in Bengaluru is becoming a “truly global CoE.”
“We are building a comprehensive site that is a microcosm of NetApp, not just an engineering centre. In the last 12-18 months, we have built other parts of the ecosystem – a strong presence in terms of IT, shared services, professional services,” he says.
Professional services include services provided on its own products – their implementation and maintenance – and consulting in areas like storage architecture and hybrid cloud architecture.
The centre is also doing work like payroll and order management for NetApp globally, centralising the back-office operations that are used by multiple departments and countries to bring efficiencies.
Visweswaraiah says innovation out of the India centre is also going very well. The entire storage efficiency work is now done out of Bengaluru. The centre has raised these efficiencies from 1:2 to 1:4 over the past few years – in other words, data takes half the space compared to earlier. “Let’s say I have 10,000 pictures on this phone. Let’s say that is 10GB. We can store it in one-fourth the space. We do encryption, compression, compaction (rearrangement), deduplication. If the same data is there more than once, that is, if the bits & bytes of multiple pictures are similar, then we save only once. When you look at the picture, the system stitches it all back. Algorithms determine what is being repeated. It all depends on the efficiency of the algorithm,” Visweswaraiah says.
A new product released for hybrid cloud data protection, called NDAS (NetApp Data Availability Services), was majorly built out of Bengaluru. It’s an application that resides in the cloud but which can protect a company’s on-premise data.
The Bengaluru centre also developed a new version of NetApp’s service level management solution, one that enables customers to automate data centres with service level objectives, simplifies data management by setting policies, monitors to see if there are violations of policy, and, if there are violations, corrects them. “A policy can be that an application requires this much capacity all times, and it is the job of this product to maintain that capacity; or a critical application requires a certain degree of performance, and this ensures that,” Visweswaraiah says.
Connecting data across inhouse infra, multiple clouds has become simple: Bharat Badrinath, VP of product marketing
NetApp’s vice president of product & solutions marketing Bharat Badrinath says it’s fast becoming a multi-cloud environment in companies because every cloud vendor brings certain competencies. “If you are in the .Net framework, Microsoft’s Azure becomes very critical. If you are looking at more of a machine learning or AI related environment, Google brings its strength. AWS has brought in a big strength in terms of their applications, platforms to build applications faster,” Badrinath told TOI at the NetApp Insight conference in Barcelona in December.
So companies will typically want to use multiple clouds. And multi-cloud, Badrinath says, is becoming very popular. So now your data is not only on-premise (inside the company’s own infrastructure), but also across multiple clouds, as also on the edge (in devices such as cars, mobile phones, appliances). “How do you bring all of these together? That’s where the data fabric plays a very critical role. Bringing together data has become far simpler today than it was in the past,” Badrinath says. NetApp’s data fabric – an architecture and a set of data services – provides the ability for a business to shift workloads wherever they like.