NetApp is banking on technology’s tendency to bust down barriers.

The company’s goal is to bridge the divide between on-premise storage and the cloud for customers of its storage platforms. During this week’s AWS re: Invent conference, Amazon’s cloud-centric customer and partner conference, the data storage vendor announced NetApp Private Storage for AWS. The offering allows organizations to establish a dedicated network connection to AWS.

According to NetApp, it opens the door to on-demand data replication that spans both in-house storage and AWS, plus several other scenarios that enable businesses to strike a balance between the compute capabilities of their in-house data centers and the cost efficiencies of the cloud.

In a company blog post, Tim Waldron, Cloud Solutions Marketing Manager for NetApp, informed, “The customer owned, NetApp FAS is hosted in an AWS Direct Connect facility, essentially a colocation allowing for low latency, high bandwidth connections directly into the Amazon Web Services Datacenters.”

Waldron adds that NetApp customers will be able to seamlessly manage both environments as one. “Customers are able to SnapMirror or simply copy their dataset to this Colocation facility for immediate use via iSCSI to and from their EC2 environment. All the core efficiencies and functionality NetApp FAS, with DataONTAP, delivers are made available for the Amazon customer to leverage,” Waldron wrote.

Potential use cases include employing Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) for disaster recovery and Amazon S3 as a tape storage alternative. NetApp Private Storage for AWS also supports secure synchronous or asynchronous data replication, allowing organizations to “move data between AWS regions, increasing application redundancy,” NetApp said.

Additionally, NetApp said its product paves the way for big data analytics on the cloud for its customers if they use the product in tandem with Amazon Elastic Map Reduce (EMR). For more ambitious IT shops, NFS and CIFS support enables the transfer of entire enterprise application workloads to the cloud.

NetApp Private Storage for AWS is available now in North America. The company is plans to launch in Europe and Asia “soon.”

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