CTO Interview | Who should use Fluid and why?

Cloud manager

(2-3 minute read) 

TLDR: We talked to Fluid CTO, Alexander Turner about which businesses Fluid can help and how implementing Fluid makes life easier for the user.  

What businesses do you see Fluid helping the most?  

Fluid is a ubiquitous tool. It makes sense for anyone who is unhappy with their cloud spend and wants to take control again to regain flexibility. It helps if you’re using Kubernetes in high-demand and high-throughput workloads. 
 
One of the challenges with the cloud is it is a seemingly infinite pool of resources. The cloud is limited by how fast you can get to the cloud, and not only do you have to organize that connectivity yourself, if you’re running workloads between offices or premises or studios, you must organize that connectivity too. You also must pay for each bit that you send into or out of the cloud.  

Alexander Turner, Fluid CTO

This is where Fluid really differentiates – building edge workloads and providing you control of the edge means that those data costs can completely disappear unless they’re for internet users. The storage and overheads that you’re paying for, just by virtue of using someone else’s intellectual property, don’t exist anymore. From my vantage point, for example in the media industry, this is truly exciting because it provides scale on-premises where it’s difficult to run these high bandwidth workloads off-premises, efficiently and effectively.  

One of the reasons people move away from on-premises infrastructure is that it’s generally challenging to run. It requires a lot of engineering resources. We’ve really put a lot of effort into making Fluid as easy as possible to deploy and manage, and with that in mind, it is attractive to a cloud engineer to run and deploy. Instead of requiring an on-premises engineering team or VMware engineers, a large complex cluster can be deployed by a data center’s remote hands and managed by them instead.  

How does implementing Fluid make the user’s life easier?  

Fluid brings that cloud management experience to your edge on-premises workloads.  

The tasks that you would have to spend in setting up network, and configuring compute, and booting compute are gone. We leverage the same technologies that large-scale cloud / hyperscalers use to automatically boot servers, automatically configure servers, automatically configure the network, and present that all in one single-management pane interface, so you can simply jump in the cloud portal and manage it.  

You can plug things in and turn them on and they will PXE boot. They will configure themselves automatically. It’s touchless, it’s hands-free, it’s a really, really simple way of deploying. The cost of that comes at the cost of network configuration flexibility, and we think that’s a good thing. The same trend that we see in cloud providers today, is that they have a way of configuring the network, and that’s designed for scale, security, and resiliency. We have taken that model and applied it on-premises, so there’s no consideration to be made around architecture. There is an architecture, and it makes it as easy as possible for the end-user to conform to that.  

We know it scales, we know it supports all sorts of workloads, from complicated Kubernetes workloads, all the way to VMs running in Windows Server 2008 running payment applications. We’ve had a wide range of supported applications and tooling on top of the platform. It’s easy. 

CTO Interview | Behind the scenes: Fluid foundations

CTO

(2-3 minute read) 

TLDR: We spoke to Fluid CTO, Alexander Turner regarding why he saw there had to be a better way for on-premises environments to be created, and his favorite Fluid features, such as the bridge between cloud and on-premises infrastructure. 

Alexander, how did you become involved with Fluid?  

Coming out of a recent tenure with one of the large cloud providers, I was looking to instantiate and drive change in the industry where I felt that we had some real sticking points. I met Andrew Sjoquist (Fluid Founder), and he has brilliant ideas for Fluid. It was just a perfect match. Andrew had brilliant ideation around where the pain points were for his customers, we both had a vision, and both wanted to make a change.

Alexander Turner, Fluid CTO

Why was Fluid created?  

Fluid was created because there had to be a better way for on-premises environments to be created. 

Today, it’s become cool to move workloads to the cloud. That cloud simplicity makes a lot of sense. Cloud cost and data ingress can be challenging, but ultimately it comes down to that the cloud is not everywhere. The type of cloud deployments that we’re seeing deployed are very large, especially when one of the big three deploy a new cloud environment, it’s not generally in a small city or a small footprint. It’s fairly high demand, and there’s a high ROI required to build the infrastructures.  

We noted a trend towards edge workloads. We want to provide end-users and customers ultimate flexibility in the location of their data and their workloads. The challenge today is it’s still really hard to deploy stuff. AWS, Microsoft, and Google have their products to deploy on-premises, but it does wedge you to their cloud and their ecosystem, which may not necessarily be a good fit.  

We believe that the future of multi and hybrid cloud is driven by Kubernetes. We’ve been on a mission to democratize Kubernetes on-premises and make it as easy as possible for anyone to deploy infrastructure. We make it as easy as if you were deploying a large cluster in the cloud. We want you to be able to just plug some boxes together, power them on, run a one-line command and then take control from your portal.  

What do you think is the most awesome feature of Fluid?  

I really love the bridge between the cloud and on-premise infrastructure.  

As an engineer myself, one of the most frustrating things I’ve found working in big corporates or complicated network environments was always, how do you get access to things? Even if you’re deploying a VMware cluster, it’s often a headache getting your vSphere console access out accessible to the internet or accessible globally. It involves multiple teams, it’s a stuff around. 

We’ve built a secure reverse tunneling tool, which leverages two levels of encryption for you to use and access our cloud-hosted portal as if you were accessing a service from the cloud. Simply put, you can just go to the portal at Fluid HQ, enter your cloud pairing token, and you’re online and managing a cluster remotely.  

That bridge between cloud-managed and on-premises really makes on-premises and those edge workloads feel like the cloud again.  

Fluid & NetApp Astra Data Store: Big data needs solved with a single click. {New Feature}

Astra Data Store

(1-2 minute read) 

Fluid is on a quest to make everyone’s job easier, from DevOps engineers, to customers, to management, and everyone in between. This has been tackled, in this instance, with an integration with NetApp’s Astra Data Store that allows users to create very quickly, locations to store data on any vendor’s compute hardware –“anyware”.  

Leveraging the power of NetApp’s ONTAP operating system;  
“Fluid together with Astra Data Store has enabled a true software-defined architecture to be deployed, and redeployed as requirements change in line with business goals.” – Andrew Sjoquist, Fluid Founder.

Astra Data Store button

This new feature is particularly noteworthy as it has proven to customers that they can have a flexible and adaptable technology in an ever-changing marketplace. Not only this, but the integration is complete at the click of a button, adding to the suite of ‘easy buttons’ Fluid already has in place.  

The pandemic conditions in the last two years have shown that business conditions are prone to rapid and extreme change, and as such there should be an expectation your technology will adapt and be able to do the same.  

The need for Astra Data Store to be deployed at the edge is rapidly increasing. For example, retail businesses are quickly seeking cutting-edge data sources, monitoring systems, and applications to evaluate new consumer behaviour sparked by the impact of COVID-19. “Sophisticated retailers are evolving how they evaluate stores and optimize their network.”-McKinsey, 2020.   

Retailers are now taking a comprehensive data-driven approach that can’t always be serviced by the public cloud due to technical latency, data sovereignty, or geography limitations. Enter Fluid. 

This solution, Fluid with Astra Data Store, is defined in software and therefore allows for the cloud capabilities to be wherever you require them, taking care of geographical needs and technical latency. It’s a cutting-edge technology with fast edge deployments and redeployments through an ‘easy button’ on the Fluid interface or via the Fluid API. 

“After working closely with the Astra Data Store development teams to understand how to automatically deploy this software on Fluid nodes, we created a product that alleviates the burden on the end user to create the network configuration Astra Data Store requires,” said Sjoquist.  

Ultimately, this partnership allows all clients to have a NetApp environment for their data without the need to purchase NetApp hardware, bringing the Fluid Team one step closer on our quest to make deployments for a variety of workloads easy for all.  

NetApp uncovers the platform that transforms tin to full stack in a few minutes

 Netapp uncovers

(1-2 minute read) 

NetApp is rolling out the first third-party integration tool, Fluid, on Cloud Manager which begs the question, what is Fluid?

Fluid is an automation and orchestration system that allows businesses to accelerate the journey from bare-metal hardware (or tin) out of the cardboard box to a full-stack running in under an hour. 

Here’s NetApp’s Newsworthy Minute exploring the optimizing cloud environments with Fluid and Cloud Manager:

Key takeaways from the Newsworthy Minute are:  

  1. Fluid eliminates a series of manual steps that traditionally comes with setting up infrastructure. With Fluid, all the infrastructure complexity is absolved from the user and becomes a really simple process, taking the usual weeks or months to build up bare metal infrastructure, into a quick click of a button.  
  1. Fluid allows you to automatically stand-up connectivity between NetApp Data Fabric elements, cloud-based offerings like Azure NetApp Files (ANF), AWS FSx for NetApp OnTap, or Google Cloud Volume Services and storage systems in a matter of minutes.  
  1. Fluid eliminates the complexity of managing multiple interfaces, including the training to administer and manage those interfaces, by providing an easy user experience and single environment.  

Imagine one interface to manage all compute, network, and storage needs, no matter what preexisting vendors and systems they use.  


The inspiration behind this platform is to transfer engineering efforts placed on building complex infrastructure, into time and effort back into enhancing applications.  

Fluid is the first system to solve for an automated bare-metal hardware transformation. The first self-assembling smart infrastructure taking businesses into their own unique centralized portal for greater control and autonomy. 

Distributed Storage Solutions (DSS) Case Study

By utilising Fluid, DSS deployed its new footprint ready for scaling whilst taking advantage of advanced data centre networking concepts.

Distributed Storage Solutions

SERVICE PROVIDER

ASE

CLIENT

DSS

Distributed Storage Solutions

BACKGROUND

Distributed Storage Solutions (DSS) are a client of service provider ASE. DSS is involved with cryptocurrency, backed by decentralised storage environments.

DSS is dedicated to sustainable and robust data storage infrastructure in the Filecoin Network developed on the IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) protocol.

Decentralised storage platforms break apart the users’ files and distribute them across multiple nodes on their network, resulting in no single point of failure. Filecoin is a decentralised storage blockchain developed by Protocol Labs on the IPFS protocol. Data is stored and retrieved via a series of cryptographic proofs by the storage user and the storage provider.

THE CHALLENGE

DSS was looking to scale out a proof-of-concept lab environment into a production enterprise-scale Filecoin deployment. This larger deployment required significantly more bandwidth between the computational and storage components of the solution.

There was also a requirement to ensure new computational hosts and storage capacity could be deployed simply and without significant human resources, whilst maintaining a 100% uptime state for the environment during change that resulted from scale.

THE SOLUTION

Apply the Fluid network operating system across not only the new, 100 gigabit infrastructure, but also across on-premise server hardware, where ASE had transitioned DSS into an Equinix Data Center.

OUTCOME

ASE installed Fluid, completing the networking component of DSS’s project in just one day. This networking project would usually take one to two weeks.

By utilising Fluid, DSS deployed its new footprint ready for scaling whilst taking advantage of advanced data centre networking concepts such as routing on host (ROH), BGP, Equal Cost MultiPath (ECMP) balancing as well as achieving the most possible bandwidth from their storage architecture. This has allowed for an increase in the production of proven storage capacity and consequently an increase in the amount of FIL (Filecoin) generated for the business.

Fluid makes networking simple and allows a high throughput data to flow from DSS’s servers to their storage infrastructure. The ability to maintain 100 gigabits and more across the entire network was a core element as networking is critical. Integrating Fluid into the solution improved DSS’s network performance considerably and provided them with increased productivity.

Curious?

Enjoy a cloud-like infrastructure with Fluid’s easy buttons

easy buttons

(3-4 minute read)  

Fluid brings the magic of cloud that we’ve all come to know and love, to infrastructure, at the touch of a button. Here are the top three easy button functionalities and the Fluid Team has plans for more… 

What is Fluid?  

Fluid is an orchestration and automation platform that enables businesses to deploy cloud-like infrastructure, anywhere. It deploys cloud-like networks and compute stacks on bare-metal hardware in a matter of minutes, whether that’s on-premise, at the edge, or in a co-located facility.  


The platform’s goal is to make infrastructure easy. This collection of easy buttons mean the complexity that exists with standing up compute, network, and storage disappear. All various configuration complexities that exist within data centers now become cloud-like for any business no matter where their information resides and with no restrictions on region or location.  

Fluid comes out of the box with the following easy buttons:   

AWS Easy Button
  1. Easy button for connecting to AWS

The entire process, start to finish, of; 

  • connecting your networking stack to on-premise hardware  
  • then to the server hardware  
  • through AWS network switching hardware  
  • across an elastic cloud connect provider or a VPN tunnel 
  • to the AWS stack 
  • with all networking elements configured 
    It’s literally achieved with a click of a button.  

A process that requires a dozen steps from different teams within an organisation, and approximately a months’ timeline, is now turned around in under an hour with Fluid.  

AWS easy button = instant AWS stack set up and project cost-efficiency   


Kube Easy Button
  1. Easy button for downloading KubeConfig files

Fluid marries any tool of choice that manages your Kubernetes infrastructure, whether that’s OpenShift, Rancher, Kubectl, or any other in the marketplace, for an easy kubeconfig file button for all clusters.  

Kubeconfig button = a universal cluster management system 


Spot Easy Button
  1. Easy button for NetApp Spot Controller

The easy button to deploy NetApp Spot Controller is realized on-premises inside of Fluid, running in a co-located facility allowing for a truly hybrid multi-cloud story to form. This means the infrastructure location and complexity fade away, building features and enhancements that will really serve the client.  

NetApp Spot button = visibility and automation for all your cloud operations  


Keep a lookout for new Fluid features like an easy NetApp Astra Data Store button.  

Fluid has created the easy button for infrastructure that lives outside of the cloud. The agility of the application allows development teams to accelerate the journey from bare-metal hardware out of the cardboard box to a full-stack running in under an hour. Fluid makes it easy. 

What new Fluid features are on the way?


We talked to Alexander Turner, Fluid CTO, about what new features are in development at Fluid that we can look forward to.

Fluid CTO talks new features
Alexander Turner, Fluid Chief Technology Officer

Alexander, let’s jump straight in – what can we look forward to in the future with Fluid?

Our focus is to make Fluid as portable, scalable, and flexible as possible so it can exist where the cloud can’t and won’t, and to facilitate the next level of hybrid clouds and hyper-scalable applications. Fluid brings your workloads as close to your end-user and customer as possible. 

As the Fluid platform evolves, we see very lightweight deployments on the edge that enables our customers to truly deploy independent hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud environments that encompass everything from compute, storage to network and provide a homogenous cloud-like interface to data. 

We see Fluid running closer to the edge and bridging the gap between edge data storage, for applications like data and statistical analysis and collection, and low-latency applications where sensitivity and distance from the edge are critical.


What exciting developments are in the pipeline for Fluid? 

Our focus is supporting a hybrid mix between traditional workloads that currently exist in a traditional VM-led on-prem environment, as well as this next-generation workload which is container-driven, hyper-scalable, flexible, and largely, Kubernetes involved.  

With the latest release of Fluid, we integrate a very intelligent VM-based platform that allows you to not only import traditional VMware images but also create new VMs on top of your Fluid managed to compute cluster from our cloud interface. 

You can also create Kubernetes clusters with the click of a button.

– Alexander Turner

I think what’s most exciting for us is, we have an incredibly fast spin-up time for Kubernetes clusters, which is approximately 12 seconds where you can have full creation of API endpoint, for creation of a Kubernetes cluster with a globally accessible endpoint.  

We’ve bridged the gap between your traditional on-prem infrastructure, where it’s cumbersome gaining access to things like your Kubernetes API for management, and then the cloud where it’s incredibly easy. By using our cloud platform, we make accessing your on-prem Kubernetes environment, as simple as accessing your cloud environments.


How do you create a new Kubernetes cluster in 12 seconds?!  

It’s literally as simple as going to our web portal, clicking ‘create new Kube cluster’, inserting a name for the Kube cluster allocation, and the hardware cluster that it’s attached to, or the environment, and lastly, clicking ‘create’. Just 12 seconds later, you’ve got a cluster that you can log into, manage and start deploying Kubernetes workloads on. Being an API first development, this can also be achieved by calling the central cloud-based Fluid API. 


What’s coming with NetApp Astra?  

Being Kubernetes native, out of the box, Fluid is fully compatible with the Astra suite of products including Astra Data Store, which enables us to not only support completely distributed and scalable clustered file systems but also leverages the hybrid model into supporting modern disruptive scalable data platforms. 

Traditionally where your data had been siloed to a particular cloud provider or environment, Fluid now bridges that gap and leverages, not just the Astra storage which extends that storage on-prem, but provides you the tools to leverage that storage on-prem with modern platforms, such as Kubernetes.

How can Fluid support FSx for NetApp ONTAP deployments? 

Fluid seamlessly connects components of hybrid cloud environments together, whether they exist in a public cloud-like AWS, or on-premises, or at the edge. By handling connectivity requirements inherently, utilizations of FSx for NetApp ONTAP in AWS for a wide variety of use cases are made simpler. Fluid provides the bridge that the NetApp Data Fabric needs to connect data assets anywhere and in any cloud. 


What makes you excited about Fluid?

Fluid really opens up a new world of modern, scalable infrastructure on-prem, that’s completely cloud-agnostic. The pain of configuring complex infrastructure on-prem is very familiar to IT admins and executives that manage those teams from a cost basis. It’s usually a complicated multi-week process, spinning up multiple modern private cloud tools like OpenStack, requires expert knowledge in that field. What really excites me about Fluid is, we’ve taken an intelligent scalable reference architecture, and we’ve made it so easy to deploy. Then we’ve made the management of it grossly simplified too.  

What drove the trend of moving to the cloud is the scalability of the cloud and the resources that are available, but also then the manageability is so much easier. You can jump onto a cloud provider and spin up resources in a matter of minutes from signing up. With Fluid, users get the flexibility, and that turns up from an infrastructure basis for the first time, and I find that incredibly exciting.  

Thanks, Alex!


Fluid Founder talks Fluid for NetApp

We talked to Andrew Sjoquist, Founder of Fluid, technology visionary, and all-round great guy, about all reasons why people at NetApp need to know about Fluid and how it can make their lives easier.



Andrew, tell us why the team at NetApp would be interested in Fluid?

Fluid is an automation and orchestration platform that allows the promise of hybrid and multi-cloud stories to come true. It is an enabler for NetApp technology, from either native leverage of technologies like NetApp Trident that we utilize to connect containers and virtual machines running in Fluid to NetApp storage systems, or from the visibility and enhanced functionality that is achieved by connecting Fluid to NetApp Cloud Manager.

For NetApp team members, that integration with Cloud Manager introduces a whole world of new and exciting possibilities for NetApp technology in the eyes of the customer.  We’re seeing already from early adopters that Fluid customers are exposed to services like Cloud Backup, Cloud Insights, Spot and other technologies that they wouldn’t have necessarily seen had that not been driven there through the management of their Fluid environment from within Cloud Manager.

In addition, Fluid simplifies the network complexities of connecting various public and private clouds together to create a true hybrid, multi-cloud environments.


Who at NetApp would be interested in this product?

Public Cloud team: Fluid provides a fantastic way of connecting to and from public clouds, bridging that frontier gap that’s existed between them previously, to make real hybrid clouds.

Teams who inherently run AFFs, FASs, and E-Series – basically any ONTAP or SANtrictiy system – as well as StorageGRID. There’s really something in there for everybody from a product perspective. 

Spot team: Fluid allows for the analysis and presentation of on-premise workloads natively inside of the Spot Cloud Console to provide a true side-by-side comparison between workloads running on-premise, and workloads running in the cloud, from a cost management perspective.

Edge team: Fluid creates a way to deploy compute at the edge, but also as a propagation box for Astra Data Store. We can easily and automatically deploy Astra Data Store, and make the promise of that whole fantastic story ring true.

How would NetApp Partners look to utilize Fluid?

Partners are going to deploy Fluid as an easy way of creating hybrid architecture, particularly with on-premise infrastructure.  All the complexities that go into building on-premise hardware or in data center hardware, and then connecting into the cloud, goes away and are done in a matter of minutes.

Partners can look to retire their legacy hypervisors, which used to be a whole other console, whole other interface, a whole other set of skills, as that all now wraps up inside of Cloud Manager to treat that on-premise environment as the fourth cloud.

We can actually create and treat on-premise infrastructure, resources, storage compute, and networking as a cloud vendor. We’ve pulled out all the best configuration, principles, and methodologies that Cloud Vendors operate in, and worked them into Fluid so that it becomes just a turnkey click of a button for customers to deploy cloud-like architectures.

 
How can Fluid help NetApp teams retain their existing customers?

Leveraging Fluid and how it deals with the compute element is a great pathway to penetrate all land-and-expand accounts that haven’t previously been penetrable. For example, Fluid deploys on anyone’s x86 compute hardware, deploys on anyone’s servers, and then creates a nice wedge point and discussion point for other NetApp services like Insight and Astra Data Store, and AFS. Fluid completes the whole story.

It means that the conversation doesn’t have to get stonewalled when a customer says that they’ve already running a competitor’s product.

What other NetApp products does Fluid integrate with?

Spot, Astra, Trident and it connects back to ONTAP so it can leverage the ONTAP capabilities around functionality and any other feature that’s callable on NetApp API’s. 

Fluid integrates with E-series mainstream products, ONTAP AI – because we handle the complexities and the networking and these environments, and of course provide optional connectivity into the cloud inherently, to connect through the public cloud if required. Or you can connect it between sites, in between Private cloud, making all the networking complexities simple. It’s a win-win product.


Where do I find Fluid to check it out?

You can find Fluid inside of Cloud Manager. We are the first third-party integration on the platform. It’s currently in closed preview, accessible to people with NetApp.com email addresses. If you’re interested and can’t access it, shout out to us at connect@fluidhq.io and we can easily set that up for you. 

Thanks, Andrew!


Ezypay: A Fluid infrastructure transition

We’ve loved partnering with you because you’ve come with us on the journey, as we’ve grown, so have you.

Andrew So, CIO

SERVICE PROVIDER

ASE

CLIENT

Ezypay

BACKGROUND

Ezypay is Australia’s leading solution for subscription and direct debit billing. The company offers a cloud-based subscription payment platform to manage recurring direct debit payments across multiple sites, multiple payment methods, and multiple currencies to businesses and their customers across the Asia Pacific region.

Ezypay has been a client of service provider ASE for over eight years. During that time ASE has delivered colocation, connectivity, and unified communications services.

After a technology analysis of their business, ASE originally relocated Ezypay into an Equinix colocation facility, out of their offices in Chatswood, NSW, Australia. To take advantage of the better availability and uptime of services, ASE shifted Ezypay infrastructure and workloads, which also came with a host of other advantages from a connectivity and security perspective, as well as access to cloud services.

THE CHALLENGE

Ezypay’s business evolved to make more use of cloud services, particularly on Amazon Web Services (AWS). A requirement remained to continue existing colocated infrastructure, due to several compliance and operational reasons. It was critical to keep data close, out of the clouds, or available between multiple clouds.

The infrastructure that Ezypay had colocated comprised of VMware, an IBM SAN, and IBM Lenovo servers and continued for several years. Eventually, that came to an end of life where they had to migrate in some way, shape, or form.

Without a need for a full refresh, or to redeploy a VMware environment and traditional legacy SAN and server application environment, Fluid came into the picture as a solution.

THE SOLUTION

Ezypay looked to Fluid to transition to a more agile and modern architecture.

Fluid provided the capability to not only deploy new containerised services, which their developers and other teams can create simply and quickly using infrastructure as code practices but also for Ezypay to migrate and run their legacy VMware environment as containers inside of Fluid.

Ezypay received the best of both worlds, to have the forward-looking approach of being able to deploy new containerised services into the environment, but also to support the legacy environment as well. They maximised their investment for hardware, general maintenance, and other overheads that come with maintaining an environment.

Fluid’s integration with NetApp Cloud Manager and Trident (the CSI storage container storage interface for Kubernetes that is also deployed out of the box automatically when you deploy Fluid) provided visibility and control of all compute, network, and data storage elements that make up the solution. The ability to manage data as a discrete and highly prized asset by utilising NetApp technology such as Snapshot and data replication improved resiliency and peace of mind. Not only does Ezypay use Fluid, but they also use NetApp Private Storage (NPS) as a service offering from ASE.

OUTCOME

Ezypay has moved from an environment where they were using legacy infrastructure, with legacy backups and data management, through to implementing Fluid to be agile with how they go forward with their product enhancements and general technology operations as well.

Implementing Fluid has resulted in Ezypay being able to place more focus on their application and therefore their users, as opposed to maintaining legacy infrastructure. They had already started to see the benefits of doing that when they moved from their office out to Equinix, at the recommendation of ASE.

Next, ASE will retire their co-location. Ezypay has now consolidated an entire cabinet full of equipment down to about 2RUs of rack space, thanks to the solution Fluid has enabled.

By making data more open and accessible whilst maintaining protection and privacy, Ezypay will be able to accelerate its product development across any cloud and in any region where it operates.

The ability to manage the Fluid environment from within Cloud Manager has also resulted in exposure to other NetApp services such as Snapshot Control, as well as a range of other services, like Cloud Insights, that they can easily utilise from the same portal.

Curious?

Leverage your NetApp Data Fabric with Fluid

Recently launched Fluid is taking networking and data to new heights, not to mention its ability to leverage the NetApp Data Fabric.

Fluid automates and orchestrates network, and Kubernetes deployments anywhere and is managed through the NetApp Cloud Manager. The only third-party integration into the Cloud Manager, ever.

Fluid tightly integrates the NetApp Data Fabric into the seamless environment created – weaving a common platform for application data, across different private and public clouds and geographically diverse infrastructures.

NetApp data fabric with Fluid

The Fluid Team were quoted saying, “The benefits and functions of the Data Fabric are available through the whole environment for you or your client. It has the ability to develop projects that are agile, fast, simple and of course, easily managed through the Cloud Manager. There’s also full transparency on usage and costs. This in turn, also makes it an affordable option, especially when coupled with the knowledge that one does not need expensive software (VMWare **cough) to bring it to life.”

Fluid Team Member

Fluid isn’t just about leveraging your NetApp Data Fabric. It’s a better way of:

  • Building combined on premises and cloud deployments
  • Creating and deploying fully managed networks across edge, core data centre and public cloud locations
    • Deploying Kubernetes clusters for application deployment across infrastructures and geographies
  • Fast forwarding cloud and cloud projects into production in days rather than months, with a small and nimble team
  • Bring your NetApp Data Fabric to life by providing native, flexible connectivity into your environment all from the one console

Fluid brings the Data Fabric to life and puts it to work in the environment in a single step from the single console. Simple.

Talk to our team about how to make the most of your NetApp Data Fabric Today.


Contact us connect@Fluidhq.io