Get the balance right. The right storage for every workload
Ricky Martin
Now, more than ever change is impacting our lives. This past year has forced us to take an extraordinary digital leap in our everyday activities. From online grocery shopping to meal delivery, and mobile banking, we no longer run around doing errands, fight traffic, or wait in long lines. Think about all of the precious time we saved with services like Amazon same-day-deliveries. Many of us may never go back to the old ways of doing things, because the new ways are better. This has helped us as a society to get the balance right during radical change.
Get the balance right by silo-busting
IT environments are challenged today on multiple dimensions as the amount of data to store, access and protect is growing exponentially. Keeping IT environments running while avoiding disruptions can create an overwhelming set of tasks. During the era when using traditional “bare-metal” IT architecture was the only option, data centers experienced complexity from the practice of dedicating IT infrastructure to different databases and applications. The results were ‘silos’ in data centers that made running them more complex with increased staffing, training, management, and maintenance.You face different challenges today, but still may be deploying infrastructure as silos – this time, different silos for traditional bare-metal, modern virtualized, and next-generation container workloads. Often, mission-critical databases and applications run on the best infrastructure while everything else runs on infrastructure with limited capabilities. History has proven that dividing infrastructure resources adds to the challenges of keeping workloads running continuously. Fortunately, NetApp delivers the ability to support disparate workloads simultaneously with one storage platform.
Choosing NetApp helps you keep things running smoothly today and positions you well for the needs of tomorrow. NetApp ONTAP runs in multiple clouds, and in your data center. Without NetApp, data remains trapped across different storage platforms that lack the innovation and capabilities to offer a unified storage experience. For example, if you use Dell you may need multiple different storage platforms such as Avamar, Data Domain, ECS, PowerMax, PowerStore, PowerScale, and VPLEX for your core data center workloads.
Get the balance right in the cloud
The mobile workforce with their smartphones and tablets, the use of development and test environments in the public cloud, and the emergence of the Internet of Things is driving a shift from data centers to multiple clouds. Your data must follow your databases and applications in order to ensure a good user experience. NetApp complements your on-premises infrastructure with solutions to key challenges relevant to SAP, machine learning, healthcare, financial services, and a variety of other industries, businesses, workforces, databases, applications, and storage. Without these cloud services, workloads remain trapped in place and incapable of leveraging seamless integration to multiple clouds.While NetApp delivers a common storage experience anywhere and everywhere, other storage system vendors continue building storage product offerings with limited integration to multiple public clouds and few native cloud services, if any. When using storage from Dell and Pure, for example, you must overcome challenges created by a lack of innovation: neither offers diverse native cloud services that go beyond storage and data protection; or hybrid multi-cloud storage across private clouds, Microsoft Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud simultaneously; or even offer support for block, file, and object protocols from the same cloud-integrated storage platform.
Get the balance right for primary and secondary workloads
Near-term storage requirements are tricky to predict, so long-term ones are nearly impossible. Guessing wrong can impact IT budgets and risk the ability to meet service level objectives (SLOs) that drive business success. NetApp adapts to meet all present and future requirements as the needs of businesses continue to evolve, wherever and whenever changes happen. This innovation means NetApp capabilities evolve as the needs of primary and secondary workloads change and scale to meet all storage requirements today and tomorrow. Other storage vendors like Dell, for example, offer different storage platforms for primary versus secondary workloads – and different storage systems for high-end, mid-range, and entry-level workloads – and this creates a mix of different software and incompatible hardware that complicates everything.Get the balance right with a future-proof infrastructure
NetApp has a long history of keeping storage running effectively and efficiently through continuous innovation and non-disruptive upgrades. That’s why, for nearly a decade with the introduction of the data fabric, NetApp customers have routinely mixed multiple generations of storage systems, controllers, and drives while adapting, scaling, and modernizing infrastructure.NetApp continues to enhance the ONTAP storage platform by introducing support for new:
- innovations like cloud-native storage, software-defined storage, and modern unified storage
- architectures like cloud-native, multi-cloud, and hybrid cloud
- technologies like end-to-end NVM Express (NVMe) and QLC flash
- hardware like non-volatile memory (NVM) and solid-state drives (SSDs)
- protocols like NVMe over Fibre Channel and Amazon S3
- consumption models like NetApp Keystone with Flex Pay, Flex Subscription, and Flex Utility
Get the balance right with flexible subscriptions
NetApp Keystone with Flex Pay, Flex Subscription, and Flex Utility delivers a consistent multi-cloud experience, on- and off-premises, with the ultimate in flexibility. It provides a portfolio of payment solutions and storage-as-a-service offerings for hybrid cloud environments that can deliver greater agility, financial flexibility, and reduced financial risk that helps you meet your business outcomes. Your business chooses how it wants NetApp storage infrastructure managed, with flexible options for management by NetApp experts, a certified solution provider, or your trained staff. Does your existing storage vendor offer these 3 choices?Get the balance right
Just like the innovations of digital transformation have changed our lives in a positive way, so too have NetApp innovations made life better for IT with the portfolio of NetApp Cloud Services, the modern unified storage platform based on ONTAP, and the hybrid cloud payments and subscriptions of NetApp Keystone.Get the facts. For more information check out the future of storage fact sheet.
Ricky Martin
Ricky Martin leads NetApp’s global market strategy for its portfolio of hybrid cloud solutions, providing technology insights and market intelligence to trends that impact NetApp and its customers. With nearly 40 years of IT industry experience, Ricky joined NetApp as a systems engineer in 2006, and has served in various leadership roles in the NetApp APAC region including developing and advocating NetApp’s solutions for artificial intelligence, machine learning and large-scale data lakes.
