Amazon is putting the heat on traditional data center vendors with its quest to becoming a force to be reckoned with in the enterprise IT market.  In view of the company’s success in accomplishing this goal, NetApp has adopted a new strategy: if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.

The storage vendor announced a new private cloud offering that enables organizations to leverage on-demand cloud services without giving up control of their mission-critical data. NetApp Private Storage for AWS is available in all Equinix International Business Exchange data centers that have AWS Direct Connect deployed – there are currently multiple suitable locations across North America and Asia.

“Equinix’s robust cloud ecosystem makes Platform Equinix an ideal place to combine NetApp Private Storage with AWS Direct Connect. By taking down the barriers of cloud service adoption, we believe the solution will help both cloud consumers and cloud service providers accelerate business and maximize revenue streams,” said Greg Adgate, the general manager of global partnerships for Equinix.”

A hybrid environment that delivers both elasticity and security can be difficult to implement. NetApp Private Storage offers enterprises a more convenient alternative.

The launch of NetApp’s new private cloud solution follows the announcement of EF540 and FlashRay.  The former is the vendor’s all-flash array, and the latter is a work-in-progress operating system that will extend the life of flash systems once it’s complete.

A major pitfall of flash is that it wears out faster than traditional disk, a fact of life that raises TCO considerably. By solving this challenge, FlashRay will make cheap but unreliable SSDs (the type  Apple uses in its devices) viable for enterprise use. The platform is currently in beta, and it’s expected to become generally available in mid-2014.