Oracle signs on as the fourth hyperscaler to run NetApp's Ontap storage natively

With two ways to manage the same storage, the first question is who owns it, and the technical questions come after. Pravjit Tiwana, NetApp's SVP and general manager for cloud storage and service, said NetApp is integrated into the Oracle stack at both the data plane and the control plane ^[10][11]. Oracle's console and Ontap's APIs will both reach the same assets ^[3]. That means a cloud platform team and a storage team with years of Ontap practice will each have a hand on one estate. In my view, the first decision for a customer is which of those teams provisions the storage and which one answers for its cost.

The board-deck version is that Oracle gives NetApp native Ontap services on four hyperscalers ^[14], a set that took nine years to assemble ^[15]. Oracle's pitch fits on that slide. "Enterprises shouldn't have to rebuild their data infrastructure to move to the cloud," said Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, OCI's SVP of partnerships ^[6]. The slide leaves out the date. General availability is promised "within the next 12 months" ^[8]. Tiwana said, "We already have customers who are using it for a wide number of use cases" ^[16]. He did not name them, and no price was reported. If launch lands late in that window, a team that commits this quarter will spend next quarter either running production on early access or holding its migration.

How big the promise is depends on who is making it. Papamiltiadis called the service "a trusted, familiar path to OCI" ^[7]. NetApp's own statement says customers can move Ontap workloads to the cloud while "minimizing application redesign and storage management changes" ^[4]. Tiwana, briefing reporters before the conference, went further. He said customers who built on Ontap on-premises "don't have to amend your applications in any shape or form" ^[5][11].