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How NetApp saves money and simplifies Cloud migration

How NetApp saves money and simplifies Cloud migration

‘Move to the Cloud!’ has been the rallying cry for many IT service providers for more than a decade.

Credit: ID 125202226 © Kittipong Jirasukhanont | Dreamstime.com

‘Move to the Cloud!’ has been the rallying cry for many IT service providers for more than a decade. The theoretical benefits are well known: efficiency, cost-savings, transitioning from CapEx to OpEx plus many other tangibles that make operating on-site legacy systems seem almost-quaint by comparison.

It sounds good but many companies don’t know where to start when it comes to migrating to the Cloud. Others are aware of the sometimes difficult journey they must navigate and need support. Core considerations include ensuring that applications and services can run – and be supported – as smoothly off-site as they can on-site. And backups and service continuity must adhere to customers’ strict service-level agreements (SLAs).

This is the background to NetApp’s great pivot. Once a company renowned for on-site storage solutions, NetApp moved to become Cloud-first. Rather than ringfence a moribund, hardware-based business model, it innovated by securing partnerships with major hyperscalers including AWS and Microsoft Azure. Now, both NetApp and it’s new partners, benefit from the company’s long history of data management solutions. The result is more-efficient storage, improved off-site application (and service) performance plus significant savings to the bottom line – irrespective of which Cloud provider is used.

In addition, the company’s experience with on-site solutions make it the perfect partner for migrating data, applications and services to the Cloud, whether directly or in a staged process.

However, the new and innovative data management solutions have not come at the expense of NetApp’s traditional services. Its efficient deduplication and general data management solutions are also available when using specialist services such as Microsoft Office 365 backup. But these capabilities now stretch well beyond simple file storage and recovery by fulfilling all regulatory, geographical and business compliance issues for Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business customers too.

Data is secured against user error and malicious attacks and can be stored in a nominated location with the provider the customer chooses – whether it’s AWS, Azure, or even a BYOS (Bring Your Own Storage) option.

The same applies to customer relationship managements (CRMs). NetApp can create, store, view snapshots and track changes across Salesforce backups ensuring business continuity is maintained in the most complex of circumstances.

There are many other use cases. For examples, Brisbane-based enterprise Cloud provider, TechnologyOne, saw its two, local, well-backed-up datacentres taken offline during floods. The three-day outage was catastrophic and the decision was taken to outsource by buying Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) from AWS. However, it soon recognised the data storage considerations were becoming increasingly critical –- principally with regards to security, reliability and data portability. TechnologyOne wanted, “99.999 per cent uptime, extremely high performance, synchronous data back-up in real-time across both datacentres with no user disruption and real-time data portability to accommodate one-off or seasonal workloads. And, most importantly, it didn’t want to manage the datacentre.” 

TechnologyOne asked NetApp to provide all of this as a managed service. The subsequent 85 per cent reduction in production data saw seven-figure cost savings over three years.

NetApp did this by creating a bespoke solution called Metropod – a four-node cluster containing 20TB of Flash for SQL databases and 200TB of file storage

Thomas Duryea Logicalis and NetApp relationships is aimed at maximising the value that customers realise from the adoption of NetApp infrastructure and solutions. Azure Centre of Excellence team works closely with NetApp in order to integrate with its assessment toolsets. Thomas Duryea Logicalis' CTO, Toby Alcock explains that it does this “To identify the best use cases for customers right from the beginning of their cloud journey all the way through to an ‘ongoing optimisation offering’ in our Cloud Team Managed Service.” They say of the partnership, “The ability to deliver a consistent hybrid experience will ultimately give our customers more flexibility to leverage the power, flexibility and security of Azure for their chosen workloads - while simplifying the management overhead and returning even more value to their organisations.”

In many ways, NetApp is the CIO’s best friend. The company’s history with on-site hardware and data management make it well aware of the trials and tribulations of moving to the Cloud. Meanwhile, its partnerships with multiple hyperscalers have proved to be a strategic success that’s now the envy of competitors.

If you are struggling with Cloud migration and can’t fathom how to move your applications, services and data storage to the Cloud, check out NetApp’s SaaS backup, Cloud Insights and ONTAP Data Management solutions. They are recommended by the people who actually run the Cloud.

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