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NetApp and Data Protection – Partner Strategies

Nancy K. Zehring

Businesses are working hard to keep pace with unprecedented rates of data growth. According to IDC, by 2025 worldwide data will grow 61%, to 175 zettabytes, with as much of the data residing in the cloud as in data centers. (A zettabyte, by the way, is equal to 1 sextillion bytes. Stated another way, 1 zettabyte is equal to about a thousand exabytes, a billion terabytes, or a trillion gigabytes. That’s a lot of bytes!) Companies want to derive business value from all of their data and leverage the economics, scale, and new capabilities of the cloud.

What Customers Want

As the amount of data created and stored continues to grow at astounding rates, the importance of data protection—safeguarding information from compromise, corruption,  and loss—also increases. IT managers increasingly depend on reliable backup and recovery of data, and they want to eliminate management complexity while doing so. Now more than ever, data protection is a fundamental business need. According to the Evaluator Group, 50% 0f organizations believe that data protection will become even more important than it is today.

Data Protection and Recovery Market

The data protection and recovery (DP&R) market opportunity is currently $7 billion, with growth expected to about $8.7 billion by 2022, according to IDC.



IDC also believes that the DP&R market is in a once-in-a-generation period of change, driven by new compute architectures (e.g., x86 virtualization) and related changes to storage itself. Backup and recovery products designed and optimized for traditional environments must evolve to address fundamentally new requirements. Designing a single solution to meet the needs of the rapidly shifting IT landscape is a tall order, and we expect to see significant change in the market for data protection providers. In fact, the Evaluator Group reported that 57% of organizations surveyed said they are likely to change their data protection solution within the next 2 years. Therefore, we believe that backup and recovery vendors need to evolve their capabilities into higher-order data management tasks focused on a hybrid multicloud world.



To accelerate digital transformation, data-driven organizations are building infrastructures to simplify and integrate data management across the cloud and on the premises; we call this the Data Fabric. A foundational underpinning of the Data Fabric is data protection.   



Data protection can be a challenge for organizations of all sizes. Unrelenting data growth drives the need to protect data from the edge to on the premises and across hybrid multiclouds. Management complexity is driving up costs and is not suited for the new breed of IT generalists. Finally, pressure is increasing to generate incremental value from secondary data.



NetApp and our partners have combined to deliver integrated data protection solutions that are ideally suited for protecting your Data Fabric, enabling your organization to protect your data everywhere, simplify management, and create value.

World Class Partnerships 

The combination of NetApp and integrated partner solutions delivers comprehensive data protection and management across the Data Fabric. NetApp has a long and successful history with both Commvault (established 2011) and Veeam (established 2014). Both companies have demonstrated proven, long-term commitment to the NetApp portfolio and offer expanded value and data protection for the NetApp® Data Fabric with solutions that are fully integrated. And both Commvault and Veeam were named Leaders in the 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant for DC Backup and Recovery Solutions.



Both companies offer significant incremental value when there is a need for:

  • Heterogenous storage across multiple platforms
  • A single view into the entire data protection landscape
  • Additional automation and orchestration capabilities
  • Tape management

Complete, fully featured solutions were included in the NetApp price book in October 2018

Commvault

Commvault has a broad and deep integration with NetApp ONTAP®, E-Series systems, NetApp HCI, and StorageGRID® across physical (NFS, NAS, etc.) and virtual environments, with deep NetApp Snapshot™, replication, and application cloning integration with NetApp primary storage platforms. This highly flexible solution for complex enterprise-class environments and legacy systems has resulted in thousands of joint Commvault and NetApp customers. Commvault was recently named as a Gartner award recipient for Best Enterprise Data Center Recovery and Backup Software of 2018, as reviewed by customers (November 2018).

Veeam

NetApp and Veeam have joined forces to offer high-performance storage with reliable data protection that’s designed for virtualized environments. Veeam excels in fully virtualized environments with ONTAP, E-Series, NetApp HCI, and StorageGRID. This partnership and its benefits have been extended to thousands of existing customers. Ease of deployment, ease of use, and simplicity make Veeam a snap for many customers. Veeam was recently named as a  Gartner award recipient for Best Enterprise Data Center Recovery and Backup Software of 2018, as reviewed by customers (November 2018).

What’s the Partner Opportunity?

Partners get the opportunity to sell and support a full complement of data protection solutions for all customer segments, resulting in more and larger deals with a data protection conversation.  Adding the backup and recovery conversation with your customer can increase the deal size by as much as 25% to 30%!



Here are key customer challenges that offer an opening to start a conversation about data protection strategy:

  • Not keeping pace with data growth
  • Challenges meeting RTO and RPO
  • Not keeping up with virtual protection
  • Not built for hybrid cloud
  • Too complicated
  • Concerns about scalability

Call to Action

  • Start by understanding the NetApp data protection story and market opportunity.  Watch the Data Protection for your Data Fabric video from the GetSuccessful Essentials video collection (SSO login required).
  • Make the data protection story part of every conversation with all of your customers.
  • Build your data protection solution offering, including services and support.

You’ll increase your existing deal opportunities and lock out the competition!!

Nancy K. Zehring

Nancy is a senior manager in the Worldwide Channel Strategy and Readiness team at NetApp. Her primary role involves coordinating the channel strategy for core solutions and driving the go to market success of NetApp’s channel partners globally. Nancy has been working at NetApp for over six years and prior to NetApp, spent a number of years in the Collaboration Business Development team at Cisco Systems. Nancy was part of the executive team responsible for launching the Cisco Telepresence solutions. She has over 20 years’ experience directing channel sales, driving revenue growth and developing partner business strategies. Nancy has an engineering degree from Georgia Institute of Technology.

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