NetApp and Google Cloud Advance Strategic Partnership to Drive Hybrid Cloud Innovation

Posted on December 2, 2019October 13, 2026 | by anil

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Originally announced December 2019. Source: commsmea.com / NetApp press release.

Table of Contents

Overview

NetApp and Google Cloud deepened their strategic partnership in December 2019 with a set of coordinated product launches and validations aimed at helping enterprise customers manage data across hybrid and multicloud environments. The announcement covered three major deliverables: general availability of NetApp Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud, general availability of NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP for Google Cloud, and validation of Anthos on NetApp HCI (Hyperconverged Infrastructure).

The partnership reflects a broader industry trend: enterprises increasingly need storage that combines cloud-native flexibility with the performance, data-protection, and governance capabilities historically associated with on-premises enterprise storage.

Why This Partnership Matters for Enterprise Hybrid Cloud

As organisations move workloads to public cloud, many find that commodity cloud storage falls short for performance-sensitive or compliance-driven applications. NetApp’s positioning as a “data authority for hybrid cloud” centers on providing consistent data services — replication, tiering, deduplication, snapshots, and encryption — regardless of where workloads run.

Deepak Mohan, Research Director for Cloud Infrastructure Services at IDC, noted at the time that a growing share of enterprise workloads deployed in cloud environments have a strong dependency on storage performance, and that organisations are increasingly prioritising tools that enable governance, automation, and data mobility. NetApp’s data services running natively on Google Cloud were positioned to address exactly those requirements.

What Was Announced

1. NetApp Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud — General Availability

Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud is a fully managed, cloud-native file storage service integrated directly into the Google Cloud console and billing. Key characteristics include:

Protocol support: NFS and SMB, making it suitable for Linux and Windows workloads without re-architecting applications.
Performance tiers: Multiple service levels to match throughput requirements with cost.
Enterprise data protection: Snapshots, replication, and encryption at rest and in transit.
Target workloads: Business-critical applications, databases, and analytics pipelines that require predictable, low-latency storage I/O.
Regional expansion: At launch, the service became available in the United Kingdom region in addition to existing regions.

Roger Kjensrud, CTO of Impact (a partnership automation SaaS company), described using Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud to build an agile, enterprise-grade platform, noting that it simplified infrastructure management while allowing the team to focus on product development.

2. NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP for Google Cloud — General Availability

Cloud Volumes ONTAP is NetApp’s flagship data management software running as a customer-managed instance in Google Cloud. Unlike Cloud Volumes Service (which is fully managed by NetApp), ONTAP gives teams direct control over the storage virtual machine and its configuration. Key capabilities include:

Storage efficiencies: Inline deduplication, compression, and compaction to reduce cloud storage costs.
Data protection: SnapMirror replication to sync data between on-premises ONTAP systems and Google Cloud, or between cloud regions.
Data tiering: Automatically moves cold data to lower-cost Google Cloud Storage object storage.
Unified management: Managed via NetApp Cloud Manager, giving a single pane of glass across on-premises and cloud deployments.
Hybrid mobility: Consistent ONTAP APIs and tooling simplify lift-and-shift and cloud-bursting scenarios.

3. Anthos on NetApp HCI — Validated Support

Google Cloud’s Anthos is an application modernisation platform that lets teams deploy and manage containerised workloads consistently across on-premises infrastructure and Google Cloud. The December 2019 announcement confirmed that NetApp HCI had been validated as an on-premises hardware platform for running Anthos.

NetApp HCI is a disaggregated hyperconverged infrastructure system that separates compute and storage scaling — organisations can add compute nodes or storage nodes independently, rather than scaling both together as traditional HCI requires. Key capabilities relevant to the Anthos validation include:

Hybrid cloud orchestration: NetApp Trident, an open source Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver, connects Kubernetes workloads on Anthos and NetApp HCI to NetApp storage services, including Google Cloud volumes, creating a unified hybrid storage fabric.
Independent scaling: Add compute capacity for container workloads or storage capacity for persistent volumes without over-provisioning either resource.
Broad platform support: NetApp HCI supports Anthos, upstream Kubernetes, VMware vSphere, and NetApp Kubernetes Service on the same underlying hardware, giving operations teams flexibility in their application platform choices.

Kevin Ichhpurani, Corporate Vice President for Global Ecosystem at Google Cloud, highlighted that the Anthos-on-NetApp-HCI validation gave customers more choice in validated on-premises hardware, reducing risk for enterprises adopting Anthos in regulated or latency-sensitive environments.

The NetApp Data Fabric Strategy

The announcements fit within NetApp’s broader “Data Fabric” concept: a consistent, policy-driven layer for data management that spans on-premises systems, edge locations, and multiple public clouds. The goal is to allow data to move freely to wherever it is most efficiently processed, while maintaining a single set of governance, compliance, and protection policies.

Anthony Lye, Senior Vice President and General Manager for Cloud Data Services at NetApp, framed the Google Cloud partnership as an extension of that mission — enabling organisations to take advantage of Google Cloud’s strengths in application development, analytics, and machine learning without sacrificing the data management capabilities they rely on in their on-premises environments.

Key Takeaways for DevOps and Platform Engineering Teams

Persistent storage for GKE and Anthos: NetApp Trident’s CSI integration means Kubernetes workloads on Google Kubernetes Engine or on-premises Anthos can use NetApp volumes as persistent storage with full snapshot and replication support.
Lift-and-shift path: SnapMirror replication between on-premises ONTAP and Cloud Volumes ONTAP on Google Cloud provides a low-disruption path for migrating NFS/SMB workloads to the cloud.
Cost management: ONTAP’s storage efficiency features and data tiering to Google Cloud Storage can significantly reduce effective storage costs compared to running purely on persistent disk.
Validated reference architecture: The NetApp HCI + Anthos validation reduces integration risk for organisations standardising on Anthos as their hybrid application platform.