With Partners: Boldly Going Where No ONTAP Has Gone Before

Star Trek fans probably remember the TV show's opening statement: 'Space, the final frontier.' The mission of the starship Enterprise was to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one had gone before.

It's a natural instinct to want to explore and to discover, to go where no one has gone before. When it comes to technology, at NetApp, we see it as our mission to partner with others to find new, innovative and useful ways to use it. We continually ask ourselves how we can apply technology in new ways to reach and serve customers. How can we add more value?

Enter ONTAP Select. We have delivered a way for ONTAP, NetApp's industry-leading storage operating system, to boldly go where no ONTAP has gone before. To explore new platforms, to seek out new customers and market opportunities, and to expand the reach of ONTAP by:

• Partnering with innovative storage solution providers using non-NetApp hardware and ONTAP Select, allowing these partners to certify their appliances with ONTAP Select
• Guiding them through the testing and certifying the results. Customers can trust and know that the system is going to work.
• Providing a defined, rich set of benefits to partners that successfully participate in this initiative

To make this possible we leverage ONTAP Select, the premier Software-Defined Storage (SDS) offering in the market. SDS provides a quick and easy way for partners to develop customer-oriented solutions and be recognized and rewarded for the value they provide. Some of the common software-defined storage use cases are below:

• Ruggedized/Specialized systems. Tactical, mobile storage scenarios and first responder situations, environmentally challenging and mobile environments
• Mobile Storage Systems.Data acquisition in mobile environments and automated migration/replication of data from the detached edge to the data center
• Integrated data management on IoT gateways and aggregation devices and effective data mobility from the storage edge to the cloud
• Remote office/branch office. Leverage existing hardware (servers) for greater utilization of existing investments and ease of deployment and management
• Hybrid cloud implementations. Both on-premises implementations and hosted private cloud can be managed with the same data management platform, with no variation in tools, reporting, and training required
• Data center infrastructure modernization. Policy-based, self-service storage as a service

When partners join the ONTAP Select initiative, everyone wins. Both NetApp and our partners enjoy broader market opportunities. End user customers experience the benefits of industry-leading storage software on their choice of platform.

Partners that successfully join the ONTAP Select Validated Solution initiative benefit from:

• Promotion on our SDS site and PartnerConnect, NetApp's partner directory.
• Access to technical materials on the Field Portal
• Access to comprehensive web-based training from NetAppU (our technical training organization)
• Access to a 'Select Validated Solution' emblem for their own marketing use.

With ONTAP Select Validated Solutions, we've expanded our market by applying a new iteration of our OS that works on additional platforms. Are you interested in taking ONTAP where it has never gone before? Learn more about ONTAP Select Validated Solutions.