NetApp FAS Storage Arrays

Why Choose NetApp FAS Storage Arrays?

As you plan the next stage of data storage evolution, there are hundreds of different vendor and technology combinations available. So why should you consider NetApp FAS Storage as your platform?

Simple

Ideally, storage should be set-and-forget – failing that, you are looking for a solution that has minimal administrative overheads. NetApp FAS combined with ONTAP data management operating system allows you to provision storage from cold in just ten minutes.

This combination of hardware and software has been designed to streamline and simplify storage management for the entire lifespan of your platform. You can even upgrade or service your storage during business hours without affecting operations or performance. Cards and controllers can be replaced quickly, designed in such a way that servicing is simple and straightforward, minimising the risk of errors that may result in downtime.

Deploying NetApp FAS also helps to simplify your overall infrastructure. FAS arrays offer the same functionality as both SAN and NAS, allowing you to replace both with a single alternative.

Smart

Flexible and modular, the NetApp FAS range can scale up and out according to your changing data storage needs. Scale-up by adding capacity and controllers, scale-out by growing nodes – adding up to 176PB of capacity.

ONTAP also simplifies the process of integrating public cloud services with your FAS arrays. Data and workloads can be migrated between on-premise and hosted services quickly and easily – or automated entirely where appropriate. You can define tiers of service, then allow ONTAP to migrate data to the storage platform best suited to deliver on those requirements.

Built with one eye on the future, NetApp FAS supports large volumes of data in various formats. With provisions for unstructured data, FAS arrays are suitable for vanilla file storage and big data analytics operations.

Trusted and Secure

Using ONTAP Volume Encryption, any data held on your NetApp FAS arrays can be encrypted while at rest. This encryption is built-in as standard, so there’s no need for special encrypting disks. Once data is no longer required, individual files can be cryptographically shredded and sanitized, making them unrecoverable in line with data protection demands like GDPR.

Other features like rules-based access control (RBAC) and multi-factor authentication prevent unauthorised use of admin systems and your data. Even more granular, storage-level file security to protect data against unauthorised access or deletion – even by admin users.

The ONTAP – FAS combination also offers excellent replication capabilities. This helps to accelerate recovery and ensure consistent data protection across your application estate, including asynchronous replication to the cloud for remote backup and recovery. There’s even deep integration with leading backup applications to further simplify management.

NetApp FAS storage has demonstrated proven, real-world six-nines availability, underscoring the built-in resilience of the platform. Market-leading reliability means that businesses across the world are happy to place their trust in FAS arrays for mission-critical data storage.

A great choice for your data storage requirements

The NetApp FAS family offers a family on which to build your data storage future. Excellent features combined with leading security provisions add up to a platform you can trust with your most important workloads.

To learn more about NetApp FAS and what it offers your business, please get in touch.

NetApp

How NetApp became a vital part of your public cloud strategy

As businesses look to balance current resource demands with strategic growth plans, hybrid cloud offers a useful platform for both. Now research from IDC suggests that NetApp is a critical enabler of hybrid cloud strategies – and you should seriously consider these technologies for your projects.

Leading the way with NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

NetApp’s flagship ONTAP technology has been instrumental in helping existing customers embrace the public cloud. Using the same familiar interfaces and tools, ONTAP users can quickly and easily manage workloads in any location – including the cloud.

ONTAP is now available on all the major platforms – AWS, Azure and Google Cloud – allowing users to expand into the public cloud within a matter of minutes.

And for non-NetApp users?

NetApp has continued to develop tools to assist businesses with their strategic cloud tools – including those who are not currently customers. NetApp Cloud Volume Service is a fully managed file storage service that accelerates the journey to the cloud and helps users maximise value from their hosted investments.

With the Cloud Volume Service subscribers can get started immediately; there is no need to own any other NetApp products or services. They still benefit from the same file storage technologies, but with the added benefit of expert management.

Azure users have an additional benefit – the Cloud Volume Service can be purchased from Microsoft direct as a native service This reduces the number of contracts and suppliers you need to deal with, further lowering TCO.

But why NetApp?

This all sounds great in principle – but why has IDC singled out NetApp specifically? Two major reasons – flexibility and future-proofing.

Initially, NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP was designed to allow users to migrate workloads between on-premise data centres and the cloud. As hosted technology has matured, businesses have begun to consider the potential of multi-cloud infrastructure. By selecting the best services from each vendor, they can better contain cloud costs, increase flexibility and optimise the performance of every aspect of operations.

Because ONTAP and Cloud Volume Services are available on multiple platforms, moving files between providers becomes much easier – and potentially quicker too. NetApp empowers businesses to migrate between providers to ensure they are always receiving the best value from their investments and allowing them to change providers as circumstances change.

Discover the NetApp cloud

IDC advice is clear. Businesses should seriously consider NetApp’s cloud service offerings to improve cost and performance for their cloud workloads. The ability to view workloads wherever they are located (on-premise or in the cloud) will allow them to deliver a consistently good experience in any setting.

To learn more about NetApp cloud services and how they will help you turbocharge your file storage strategy, please get in get in touch.

NetApp Scale-out NAS

Why NetApp Scale-out NAS: The best hybrid cloud solution

Organisations are increasingly adopting “cloud-first” strategies as a way to maximise operational flexibility and simplify the process of scaling resources on demand. But the reality is that not all workloads and data are suited to the cloud, which means that network-attached storage will continue to be important for the foreseeable future.

Not all network-attached storage (NAS) is created equal, however. Your choice of NAS solution will have implications for IT strategy (including cloud), either creating new opportunities or limiting choices in future.

This is why you should seriously consider NetApp Scale-out NAS which has been identified as the scale-out storage industry leader by IDC.

Seamless cloud integration

The foreseeable future of IT remains hybrid, with some resources hosted on-premise and some in the cloud. However, the choice of technology will play an important role in how your organisation takes advantage of this hybrid setup.

Choosing NetApp NAS technology with StorageGrid management tools will allow you to automatically migrate workloads between storage tiers (including cloud) for maximum price-to-performance value. In this scenario, data access is seamless, regardless of physical location.

NetApp NAS users also benefit from a clear migration path when they do choose to move more of their workloads to the cloud permanently. NetApp file-based storage (FBS) and ONTAP management software can be used with popular public cloud services (AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google) for maximum flexibility – and to avoid vendor lock-in.

AI-powered storage

Moving data manually between tiers is a major operational overhead, losing many of the cost benefits of doing so. NetApp NAS users can rely on ActiveIQ AIOps to automate the process of moving data from high-performance on-premise all-flash arrays to lower-cost cold storage in the cloud.

ActiveIQ also optimises the environment automatically, compressing and deduping data to maximise storage potential and performance. This allows NetApp users to control costs and extend the lifespan of their storage assets.

Enhanced hybrid security

ONTAP data security, included with NetApp NAS solutions, offers exceptional protection for your data – wherever it is located. Choosing NetApp extends enterprise-grade security across your entire storage estate – including encrypting data at rest and in transit.

ONTAP also offers granular protection against malicious deletions and data loss. Users can define appropriate retention standards to meet legal, industry and internal compliance requirements.

Planning for the future

As an industry leader in the field of network-attached storage, NetApp NAS products bring together cutting-edge technologies with intelligent automation to build a future-ready platform for growth.

When combined with ONTAP enterprise data management software, you can simplify and modernise storage – even though a hybrid environment would normally add complexity to management and operations.

IDC analysts are clear: Customers in need of an FBS on-premises and hybrid cloud strategy should consider NetApp because of its expanded product portfolio, investment and vision.

To learn more about how industry-leading NetApp Scale-out NAS technologies will help you build a hybrid platform that works – and how WTL can help – please get in touch.

Storage Area Network (SAN)

5 Reasons your SAN deployments should use NetApp

The storage area network (SAN) plays an integral role in operations, making the choice of underlying technology of strategic importance. The right SAN solutions will accelerate operations and create opportunities to develop new efficiencies.

So why should you choose NetApp technologies for your SAN?

1. The speed you need

The speed at which you can access data is increasingly important. Real-time operations are reliant on near zero latency to make split-second decisions. Built on NVMe over fiber channel, NetApp all flash storage reduces response times to just 100 microseconds; the AFF A800 SAN cluster is capable of delivering 8.4 million IOPS.

Performance gains will benefit any business, even those who do not use real time applications. At the most fundamental level, improving speed of access to data will allow you to better serve your customers.

2. Always-on data availability

Built to include fail-over and redundancy as standard, NetApp AFF SAN solutions maintain access to data during planned and unplanned events. Increased availability allows you to better plan and execute projects, such as upgrades and migrations, without affecting operations.

With always-on availability, your business is also better prepared to manage unexpected events, such as localised system failures or natural disasters.

3. Reliable infrastructure

NetApp AFF SAN is not only speedy and available – it is reliable too. You can trust your SAN to deliver consistently whenever you need it. Built in support for data protection, encryption and ultra-fast response times, makes NetApp a solid and reliable data platform on which to build for the future.

The NetApp SAN product range is also certified by major application vendors including Oracle, SAP and Microsoft. Certification guarantees an acceptable level of performance for your applications and databases when properly configured and optimised.

4. Super-fast provisioning

Cloud technologies have shown what is possible, spinning up resources when required to deliver a consistently high quality of service. With NetApp AFF arrays you can provision storage and apply quality of service objects in less than ten minutes, allowing you to meet your SLA obligations more easily.

In the age of DevOps and containerised microservices, ultrafast provisioning is an essential aspect of operations, allowing your business to spin up (or spin down) resources as demand changes.

5. Intelligent data positioning

NetApp’s FabricPool technology simplifies the process of positioning data for the optimal price – performance balance. For the highest performance requirements, data is stored locally on the NetApp AFF SAN. Lower priority information can be offloaded to cheaper storage in the cloud, or copied for data protection, analytics and archiving purposes. FabricPool makes it possible to move data between storage types seamlessly, automatically as priorities change.

NetApp SAN solutions are an excellent choice for any business. Performance, reliability and availability, coupled with cloud-ready connectivity, offer a platform that is suitable for virtually any workload or application.

To learn more about NetApp AFF SAN solutions and how they will help your business achieve more, please get in touch.

Artificial Intelligence

All Flash Arrays and Your Artificial Intelligence Future

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is set to become an increasingly important aspect of your operations in the near future. Indeed, AI will help to automate and accelerate many of your core business operations.

However, the choice of technology will also play an important role in ensuring AI delivers on expectations. Here are some factors to consider moving forwards.

Machine Learning, model training and storage

Building and training models takes time, usually because the algorithms need to process vast amounts of data for pattern analysis. Google’s famous Deepmind cancer detection model was trained using images and health records from more than 90,000 patients .

While developing a machine learning model, the primary focus is the accuracy of the results. This means that speed can take a back seat while the data science team tweaks and refines algorithms and verifies that all is working within expected parameters.

During development, low-cost cloud storage or higher latency spinning disk arrays will (normally) be adequate.

Production AI and speed

Once the model moves into production the choice of storage becomes much more important. As well as improving the accuracy of decision-making, AI is intended to accelerate outcomes by performing calculations and inferences more quickly than a human.

This is particularly true when dealing with real-time calculations. In these deployments, speed of storage (and the rest of the infrastructure) will be critical. All-flash storage is the only viable technology available that reduces latency, both at the edge and the core.

Ultimately production Artificial Intelligence systems must be designed to improve data flow at every point of the lifecycle – with the exception of archived records that are retained for auditing or compliance purposes. This information can be stored on lower-performing hardware, like spinning disk arrays or cloud archives to help reduce costs.

AI at the edge

One of the most challenging aspects of AI design is performance at the edge. What needs to be processed and auctioned at the edge, what needs to be passed to the core for action, what can be redirected immediately to the cloud for cold storage?

NetApp Artificial Intelligence solutions have been developed to address these questions, using a tiered approach to data service that automatically directs incoming data to the correct location. Through the use of edge-level analytics, data is processed and categorised in such a way that movement is accelerated, eliminating bottlenecks for the fastest, most efficient AI operations.

For existing NetApp customers, the ability to provision and manage AI storage and infrastructure using familiar ONTAP tools. This allows your business to accelerate deployments and reduce the learning curve so your data science team can focus all their efforts on building a model that delivers true business value.

To learn more about NetApp Artificial Intelligence solutions and how they will help your business meet the challenges of the data-driven future, please get in touch.