NetApp – Fluid

Fluid partnered with NetApp to deliver a first third-party solution to Cloud Manager

Posted on January 14, 2022 | by Alex | Leave a Comment

Cloud manager

(2-3 minute read)

Fluid, one of Australia’s leading technology companies and a partner of NetApp’s Unified Partner Program, has collaborated with NetApp, a global, cloud-led, data-centric software company, to deliver a new customised modular cloud service to the global marketplace, launched on NetApp Cloud Manager.

Fluid is an automation & orchestration platform for connected networking, smart storage & collaborative compute, that takes lengthy operations down to just minutes at the push of a button. The technology leverages Kubernetes to ensure a solid base for a scalable multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud solutions. Fluid allows for the instant creation of Kubernetes clusters and virtual machine workloads on physical hardware; backed by modern, cloud-scalable networking and storage, all managed from the single pane of glass that is the Fluid Cloud Manager Dashboard.

“Congratulations to the team at Fluid on the development of such an innovative solution to bring to market through NetApp Cloud Manager,” said Neville James, Director of Channel & Alliances, NetApp Australia and New Zealand. “The market is demanding support on their digital transformation journey to transition to a more agile, modern, and hybrid-cloud architecture. NetApp partnering with Fluid provides a unique technology to support our customers’ data management.”

Fluid Founder, Andrew Sjoquist said, “We are thrilled that Fluid has earned its place in NetApp Cloud Manager. We have been working on this project in conjunction with teams across the NetApp organisation, working on a secret sauce that enables the quickest and most flexible networking that you will find, along with a robust, Kubernetes-powered edge compute solution. It’s a fantastic solution for our clients, for NetApp partners, and anyone looking for a better way in their technology projects.”

One of the brilliant benefits of Fluid is its speed and simplicity. With built-in networking orchestration, building and deploying diverse environments becomes the work of a sole operator, rather than multiple project groups. Fluid allows all the elements in building, configuring, and deploying a multi-cloud, multi-location, geographically diverse environment to be completed in a single step – in just minutes.

Fluid allows unparalleled flexibility by deploying its operating system across the integrated infrastructure it provisions. Additionally, Fluid eliminates the need for expensive third-party software components, – such as licensed, legacy hypervisors, simplifying application cluster management, and greatly reducing cost overheads.

Fluid takes bare-metal infrastructure and, in a few clicks or API calls, builds an environment ready for workloads to be deployed as containers or virtual machines. Fluid can run Google Anthos (Fluid is Anthos ready) concurrently or separately to other management platforms such as Rancher and Red Hat OpenShift.

The platform can run these environments side by side on the same hardware, enabling the most efficient use of a company’s infrastructure.

Fluid integration achieves faster time to market, competitive advantage, cost savings, and improved project execution & efficiency.

Request a demo

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

Posted on November 24, 2021 | by Alex | Leave a Comment

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.

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.

Request a demo

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

Posted on November 22, 2021 | by Alex | Leave a Comment

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:

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.

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.

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.

Request a demo

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

Posted on October 28, 2021 | by Alex | Leave a Comment

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:

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

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

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.

Request a demo

Astra DS Blog

What new Fluid features are on the way?

Posted on October 20, 2021 | by Alex | Leave a Comment

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!

Request a demo

Fluid Founder talks Fluid for NetApp

Posted on October 14, 2021 | by Alex | Leave a Comment

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!

Request a demo

Why is Fluid a fantastic solution for the Media and Entertainment industry?

Posted on April 8, 2021 | by Alex | Leave a Comment

Fluid’s ability to quickly move large quantities of data utilizing NetApp Data Fabric across the world, quickly and seamlessly provides an enviable position for any media producer. Add to that the ability to deploy simply and quickly via a single cloud console and the agility to scale up or down as required, creates a fantastic technology solution that can help keep data close you to and eliminate cloud storage and data transfer costs.

Behind all great content is data; billions and billions of 1’s and 0’s that are the bricks of digital entertainment and information. Bringing this information and entertainment from the idea to the audience involves teams of people and increasingly these teams of people can be based anywhere, using a multitude of tools to produce a story.
The best tools to serve this content creation will be tools and technology that make it as easy as possible to share data, collaborate on projects and move data seamlessly without impediment so that creativity is frictionless and without compromise.

NetApp’s Data Fabric is the ideal environment for the data that makes up the bricks of entertainment and information. NetApp’s Data Fabric creates a robust common platform for data storage. The NetApp tool suite has extensive features that streamline and simplify data storage between different data formats and platforms. The Data Fabric allows teams of people creating and distributing content to easily manipulate and modify data between applications and platforms.

Fluid is the perfect accompaniment to the NetApp Data Fabric. Fluid is the networking component to the Data Fabric, allowing the data to be moved seamlessly between the Data Fabric and public cloud, either across the hall or across the globe – perfectly suited to the media and entertainment industry.

Fluid integrates sophisticated networking and application containerization tools to the NetApp toolset so that complex workflows can be easily created from this toolset, without setting up a complex technical project with teams of different skill sets.

It comes preconfigured with 100’s of prebuilt network routes to major media centres around the world, with more being added all the time to send and receive data. It has all of the connectivity to connect to public clouds allowing processing horsepower to be brought to a task, all from a single console.

Fluid is installed onto high-performance Mellanox infrastructure in a few easy steps. Fluid comes with powerful, but easy-to-use management tools. Installing Fluid is not a time or resource impediment to creative work.

Fluid eliminates the complexity of platform and networking projects, removing an impediment to spontaneous creative development.

Importantly with the networking cross-connects and public cloud components of Fluid, you only pay for them when you use them, allowing creators to be agile; building new flexible ways of working as required with a high degree of spontaneity; as innovative production requires needs.

With NetApp’s Data Fabric, embedded with Fluid, creators have a better way to collaborate and produce, without being encumbered by complex technical projects. These creators have a better way of collaborating with the best teams for the task regardless of where they are located. Fluid is a better way of sharing an archive and getting content to distribution platforms. It is a better way of unifying production centres. It is a better way of linking creative service providers with their clients. It helps creators deal with the unexpected at the same time as simplifying the technical production ecosystem.

Fluid and the NetApp Data Fabric, creating an easier, better way to create for the media and entertainment industry.

We’d love to hear from you, reach out to our team today.