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Oracle signs on as the fourth hyperscaler to run NetApp's Ontap storage natively
Oracle will offer NetApp's Ontap storage as a native OCI service within 12 months, NetApp's fourth hyperscaler deal after Azure, AWS and Google Cloud. A storage team planning an Oracle move this quarter gets familiar Ontap tooling, on a launch date neither company has fixed.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
What happened
- Customers will be able to manage the service through the OCI Console and SDKs or through NetApp's Ontap APIs.
- NetApp's earlier native cloud services launched with Azure in 2017, AWS in 2021 and Google Cloud in 2023.
- NetApp says the integration will simplify migrating and managing critical AI and enterprise workloads in the cloud.
- NetApp cloud storage chief Pravjit Tiwana said the company already has a large footprint of customers on Oracle database services.
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Why it matters
- decision An Ontap team choosing a cloud this quarter can count Oracle in only as an early-access option, since general availability could be as much as a year away.
- capability Storage teams can drive Oracle-hosted storage through the Ontap APIs they already script against, so a move need not start with new tooling.
- exposure Standardising on Ontap across four hyperscalers makes NetApp, more than any one cloud provider, the supplier a customer would find hardest to replace.
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 [8][13]. 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 [1], a set that took nine years to assemble [2]. 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 [11]. The slide leaves out the date. General availability is promised "within the next 12 months" [4]. Tiwana said, "We already have customers who are using it for a wide number of use cases" [7]. 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" [12]. NetApp's own statement says customers can move Ontap workloads to the cloud while "minimizing application redesign and storage management changes" [5]. 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" [10][13].
What to watch
- A firm general availability date for the OCI NetApp Storage Service, and whether it falls early or late in the 12-month window.
- Published pricing that lets buyers compare Oracle-hosted Ontap with Azure NetApp Files and the AWS and Google Cloud versions.
- Named early-access customers describing how much of their existing Ontap tooling carried over to Oracle unchanged.