NetApp advanced on its mission to support all clouds, announcing new enhancements to its ONTAP data management software. The vendor also unveiled a more flexible NetApp Keystone Flex Subscription service and a new NetApp SolidFire Enterprise Software-Defined Storage (SDS) service.

The new NetApp ONTAP data management software provides deeper cloud integration, greater consolidation, and continuous data availability to simplify and improve the efficiency of business-critical applications that run in the cloud or on-premises.

“The hybrid, multicloud is the de facto architecture of choice — either by hook or by crook — customers are going to end up in a hybrid cloud, multicloud kind of world,” said Nancy Hart, NetApp’s VP of marketing for private and hybrid cloud, DevOps, and cloud infrastructure, in a previous interview. The vendor asserts that these new updates will enable partners and customers to optimize performance and security, reduce costs, extend data management from on-premises to any cloud, and consume hybrid cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS).

Simplifying the growing complexity of managing IT, especially in regard to managing data, in hybrid and multicloud environments is the most important challenge to solve for customers, according to Brad Anderson, EVP of the hybrid cloud group at NetApp.

Keystone is just shy of rounding out its freshman year on the market as the company’s gateway program for customers to transform IT to operate like the cloud. It does this by allowing them to manage multiple locations from one place while using the tools and services native to each environment. It provides customers with a platform to consume NetApp systems and software on-premises through cloud-like subscription models for a monthly fee with the ability to boost capacity and join the public cloud through NetApp’s Data Fabric.

Keystone Flex Subscription expands on the initial Flex Pay platform. It extends that to an online platform that monitors the service subscription and adds additional capacity or online services. Anderson explained that this provides “seamless orchestration either on-premises or in the cloud.” It also uses ActiveIQ to provide customers a single pane of glass to monitor Keystone and existing assets in the customer data center.

NetApp SolidFire Enterprise SDS offers a “simple and automated scale-out all-flash storage service with strong traction in large private cloud environments such as service providers and financial institutions,” Anderson said. The new service is based on NetApp’s Element software, which is used for building high-performance private clouds that the company inherited in its 2015 acquisition of SolidFire.

SolidFire Enterprise SDS allows users to select the components that best suit the needs of their business demands, including the hardware vendor. Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) is currently the only vendor featured on NetApps hardware compatibility list. It is available as a pre-integrated storage array or as a software-defined application.

SolidFire engineers and developers bore the brunt of recent job cuts that impacted more than 5% of NetApp’s workforce. NetApp told The Register that it would be “realigning resources and investments” in order to best capture opportunities and “position the company for long-term success.”

“SolidFire, yes, I can confirm was part of the team that was impacted,” NetApp CEO George Kurian said during the vendor’s most recent earnings call. “We are narrowing our focus with the SolidFire and HCI portfolio to the high-margin parts of the market as we have signaled on prior calls.”

Historically, NetApp has focused on three areas — public cloud, private cloud, and its data fabric — so customers can deploy services and manage and store their data in a unified manner across all of their IT environments.

Over the last two years, NetApp has shifted its focus to Kubernetes with its eyes set on becoming a leading on-premises hybrid cloud platform capable of automating infrastructure for Kubernetes.

Earlier this year the data storage provider launched Project Astra to address the complications its customers encounter in orchestrating large clusters of software containers. The platform offers a normalized application data management approach that results in the portability of data rich or stateful applications, moving them from one cluster to another. NetApp’s vision is to allow companies to work seamlessly with their choice of Kubernetes distribution on any cloud.