Context

BlueXP is NetApp’s management tool. It allows storage administrators to manage the entire data lifecycle for data stored on NetApp storage technology, whether on-prem or in the cloud. BlueXP does everything you want it to do, providing a unified view of all your NetApp resources. It gives an AIOps-driven experience that simplifies traditional storage management while also tackling emerging needs around tracking utilization against sustainability goals, and even providing visibility into factors impacting cloud and subscription costs. NetApp’s BlueXP is a nice tool and a solid differentiator for NetApp.

 

NetApp recently updated BlueXP with several new data protection and cybersecurity features targeted at increasing the resiliency of NetApp’s storage offerings. Let’s delve into the details of NetApp’s announcements. 

New BlueXP BCyber-Resilience Capabilities

BlueXP launched with a solid set of data protection capabilities. Its Ransomware Dashboard, for example, integrates NetApp’s ransomware detection capabilities with NetApp’s Cloud Data Sense service to provide ransomware detection across many of the most popular third-party hosted data services. The new update expands the data protection capabilities of BlueXP with enhanced backup and recovery features, data protection across more environments, and new security certification for high-security environments.

New backup and recovery capabilities allow BlueXP to simplify the backup process for IT administrators. NetApp BlueXP unifies what was once a complex set of procedures for managing replication, snapshots, and backup policies, bringing it all together in a single management tool. This allows a storage administrator to manage the full spectrum of 3-2-1 backup strategies, on a workload-by-workload basis, across environments from a single point of control. 

Immutable snapshots are the tool of choice to provide a logical “air gap” for data, allowing you to restore data that’s known to be indelible. NetApp, with this update, brings immutable snapshots to BlueXP. This enables a greater level of cyber-resilience to systems protected by the tool. 

NetApp has also increased support for application-consistent backups of database environments across the top public cloud providers, including new capabilities for protecting Oracle Database workloads on Amazon Web Services (AWS) that use Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP. NetApp claims that this can shorten the backup window by nearly 100X compared to traditional NDMP implementations.

Analysis

There’s no question that the top concerns among IT administrators include managing resources across clouds and protecting enterprise data. NetApp tackles both with its BlueXP management offering. Beyond BlueXP, NetApp’s in-the-box real-time ransomware detection capabilities and its expansive ecosystem of data protection partners should make any NetApp customer feel safe.

NetApp’s BlueXP isn’t the only tool on the market to manage data across clouds, but it is the only one with full integration with NetApp’s storage products and services. While most tier-one storage vendors today have a similar management plane, most don’t have the cloud presence of NetApp.

NetApp stands apart from its peers as the storage provider with the deepest and most mature public cloud integration. That makes BlueXP special. Any IT organization that needs to span data across on-prem storage devices and top public-cloud providers should be talking to NetApp.

I like the direction the market is slowly heading, embedding security directly into infrastructure products. NetApp is one of the few storage vendors that detect real-time ransomware in-box on an enterprise storage product. IBM is another, taking a slightly different approach, with its released block-level anomaly detection feature for its FlashSystem products.

I’m a fan of anything that simplifies life for an IT practitioner, which is exactly what NetApp BlueXP does. It brings a unified management experience to customers who use NetApp storage technology across cloud boundaries. The new cyber-resiliency features in BlueXP go even further by simplifying data protection. NetApp is making it easy to manage data in a hybrid-cloud environment and, at the same time, is making its customers safer. That’s a competitive differentiator.