Ready for the fourth part of our NetApp cloud terminology explainer? Here we go…
What is multi-cloud?
The beauty of the public cloud is the broad range of services you can choose from, paying only for what you use. However, each platform has its variations and limitations. So building a best-of-breed application may mean using services from multiple vendors simultaneously.
If your business uses services from two or more vendors, you have joined the multi-cloud. But that additional flexibility brings significant admin overheads with it – so you need a common control plane to unify the experience. And this is where NetApp positions their BlueXP toolkit.
What are microservices?
Traditional applications were monolithic, containing everything they needed to run in a single codebase. However, this approach does not work in the modern CI/CD environment.
Instead, applications are broken down into smaller parts, each of which becomes a microservice; each function has its own microservice. Microservices are independent of the rest of the application, allowing for rapid development and deployment and increased scalability as demand increases. And because they are built for an abstracted layer, microservices can run virtually anywhere – in the cloud, on-premise, hybrid cloud or even on bare metal if required.
What is Lift and Shift?
Left and Shift is the fastest and easiest way to migrate operations to the cloud. You take your existing virtual servers and simply move them to a cloud platform. This is how most businesses began their cloud transition.
Although this approach works, it tends to be quite costly in the long run because services are not properly optimised for the pay-as-you-use resource billing model. Lift and Shift should only really be used as a stop-gap, allowing your operations to continue normally until your applications can be re-engineered for the cloud (see microservices above).
What are Dynamic Disk Pools?
RAID technology offers an important tool for protecting against data loss in the event of a server hard drive failure. But as storage capacity increases, so too does the RAID array rebuild time when disks fail.
To help accelerate the rebuild and recovery process, NetApp has introduced Dynamic Disk Pools. Using DPP your storage administrators can group sets of like disks into a pool topology. All the drives in the pool can then participate in the I/O workflow, extending failover capabilities far beyond just the disks associated with a physical array.
To learn more about NetApp cloud or for further explanation of any of these terms – please give the WTL team a call . We’re always happy to help!