What is a data fabric?

A data fabric is an architecture and set of data services that provide consistent capabilities across a choice of endpoints spanning hybrid multicloud environments.

It is a powerful architecture that standardizes data management practices and practicalities across cloud, on premises, and edge devices. Among the many advantages that a data fabric affords, data visibility and insights, data access and control, data protection, and security quickly rise to the top.

Monitor and manage your data and applications, regardless of where they live.

A data fabric is, at its heart, an integrated data architecture that’s adaptive, flexible, and secure. In many ways, a data fabric is a new strategic approach to your enterprise storage operation, one that unlocks the best of cloud, core, and edge. It can reach anywhere, including on premises, public and private clouds, and edge and IoT devices, while remaining centrally governed.

Gone are the days of disparate, disconnected infrastructures and data siloes the size of skyscrapers. A data fabric is built upon a rich set of data management capabilities that ensure consistency across your integrated environments. It reduces tedious management through automation, speeds up dev/test and deployment, and protects your assets 24x7x365.

From this unified platform, you can monitor storage costs, performance, and efficiency—the “who is using what and how”—regardless of where your data and applications live. Once you’ve gained actionable insight into your hybrid cloud environment, you can rapidly (and, in some cases, automatically) make changes to it, including remediating problems, addressing security and compliance risks, and dialing up and down compute.

Optimize as you go, even on the go. And while you optimize to save big bucks on storage, your data is protected by the highest levels of encryption—security isn’t an afterthought, but an innate attribute of a data fabric built with NetApp—with advanced backup and restore capabilities, including space-efficient read-only snapshots. Translation: unhappy hackers.

The moral of the story? A data fabric improves end-to-end performance, controls costs, and simplifies infrastructure configuration and management.

A data fabric ultimately helps your organization unleash the power of data to meet business demands and gain a competitive edge. It allows your IT organization to better harness the power of hybrid cloud, build a hybrid multicloud experience, and modernize storage through data management.

For nearly three decades, NetApp has maintained a laser focus on innovations that help our customers build stronger, smarter, and more efficient infrastructures. Our goal? Deliver the right data and applications to the right place, at the right time, and with the right capabilities. When it comes to your business, we’ll meet you where you are, seek to understand where you want to go, and then help you get there with a data fabric designed for simplicity and agility.