NetApp today introduced its unified control plane, dubbed BlueXP, aiming to simplify and automate data and storage services in hybrid and multicloud environments.

BlueXP is designed to integrate the visibility and management of users’ on-premise storage and first-party native storage with public cloud providers. NetApp’s on-premises storage offerings, including NetApp AFF, FAS, StorageGRID, and E-Series, as well as its cloud-based storage services such as Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, Azure NetApp Files, and Google Cloud Volumes Service and Cloud Volumes ONTAP, are all integrated into this single console, according to the vendor.

The software-as-a-service (SaaS)-delivered control plane also offers artificial intelligence (AI)- and machine learning (ML)-driven automation capabilities for infrastructure health and status monitoring, and user and data level anomaly detection, while integrating NetApp’s Active IQ technology for always-on telemetry across hybrid clouds.

“NetApp is simplifying our portfolio of technologies with a focus on integration and simplification,” Ronen Schwartz, SVP and GM of cloud volumes at NetApp, told SDxCentral in response to questions, adding that BlueXP is one of NetApp’s two key control planes, and the other one is Spot by NetApp, which focuses on cloud operations.

In addition to management, NetApp also targets cyber resilience by unifying control of data security based on an integrated zero-trust model.

“NetApp's portfolio of solutions includes technologies that support zero-trust as a design architecture” that include technologies such as multi-factor authentication, role-based access, multi-administrator verification, and tamper-proof logging, Schwartz said.

Those zero-trust features augment its other security services including in-flight and at-rest encryption, immutable and indelible Snapshot copies, secure replication, and AI/ML-based user and storage anomaly detection, he added.

Additionally, BlueXP also integrates NetApp’s ransomware protection dashboard. “Our ransomware solution is focused on detecting, preventing, and remediating ransomware attacks at the data layer,” Schwartz noted, adding, “AIOps-driven ability to identify sensitive data that is unprotected, discover items with overly broad permission sets, and much more, all of which can be remediated in a few clicks using capabilities integrated into BlueXP to protect, secure, and migrate data.”

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