The proliferation of cloud services has led to a confusing array of jargon and terminology. Worse still, some of these terms seem to be vendor specific. So, without further delay, here are some phrases you may encounter when working with NetApp cloud.
What is “Term Capacity Licensing”?
Traditionally storage hardware and software licensing are bundled. When you acquire new hardware, the relevant software licenses are included, tied to the specific system on which it is installed. But when you retire older hardware, the associated licenses are also ‘lost’.
Storage use has changed significantly in the era of virtualisation and cloud, with generic hardware providing a layer on which to build. This abstraction allows hardware to be replaced or upgraded without affecting operations. However, legacy terms mean that new licenses must be purchased as the storage changes.
To help businesses embrace the flexibility of modern storage architecture, NetApp has introduced ‘Term Capacity Licensing’. This new model separates hardware and software by allowing customers to purchase NetApp licenses based on storage capacity – the physical hardware on which it is installed no longer matters.
This then allows NetApp customers to modify, upgrade and replace physical hardware whenever they choose without incurring additional licensing costs.
What is “Cloud Analytics”?
For NetApp, cloud analytics describes tools and techniques that can be used to derive deep insights from data you store in the cloud. Using elements of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), cloud analytics can be applied to almost any facet of your operations. This could be in the form of understanding how your data is being used, to identifying previously invisible trends between disparate data sets.
Using cloud analytics, your business can apply real-world insights to increase efficiency, reduce operating costs, improve the quality of service provided to your customers or develop entirely new products. Insights can be generated from customer-facing or internal operations, or any combination of the two. If you can measure it, you can also analyse it.
What is “Platform as a Service”?
Platform as a Service (PaaS) is typically used to describe a basic cloud service. Your applications, virtualised servers, microservices and containers are all installed on a ‘platform’ which is hosted by the cloud provider. The platform is provided ‘as a service’ – you simply pay for the compute resources you use without the capital spend overheads of expanding your on-premise data centre.
For many businesses, PaaS offerings are essential to their digital transformation programs, allowing them to expand and contract resources as required. This reduces waste without constricting capacity.
To learn more about NetApp’s cloud offerings and how they can benefit your business (or for help understanding their next-generation terminology) – give the WTL team a call . We’re always happy to answer any question!