Dell Technologies lays out its hybrid cloud plan with a heavy dose of VMware Watch Now

Underscoring its focus on hybrid cloud solutions, NetApp on Tuesday rolled out a series of products and services jointly engineered with VMware, including a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution designed to work with VMware Horizon. The new offerings were announced during the VMworld conference in San Francisco.

Last year, as it forged a new partnership with Google, NetApp's Brett Roscoe told ZDNet that it's pursuing "opportunities really with a cloud first strategy and direction." More specifically, the company was striving to become "a data authority in a hybrid cloud world."

To that end, the offerings introduced Tuesday are designed to accelerate VMware workloads and make it easier to run applications from anywhere.

"In today's data-driven world, faster, simpler access to applications and data is critical to business success," Roscoe, VP of product Management for the NetApp Cloud Infrastructure Business Unit, said in a statement.

With VMware Horizon, workers can access virtual desktops, applications and online services through a unified workspace. The new NetApp HCI (hyperconverged infrastructure) for VDI with VMware Horizon 7 solution supports all major third-party VDI solutions. Customers can install, expand, and upgrade capabilities while adding storage and compute separately.

Meanwhile, NetApp's HCI portfolio now includes GPU-enabled nodes to accelerate high-performance, 3D VDI environments. This should be valuable for workers using data-intensive applications like medical imaging or CAD/CAM.

Next, the NetApp Kubernetes Service (NKS) now supports fully-managed Kubernetes service on VMware vSphere, regardless of where the VMware infrastructure is run. NKS stems from NetApp's 2018 acquisition of StackPointCloud. VMware customers can now use it for enterprise capabilities like in-place upgrades, role-based access control (RBAC), application lifecycle management, multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud configurations and Istio service mesh automation.

Finally, NetApp HCI Implementation Services are now available for VMware Private Cloud.