NetApp - ASEAN Trends

Destination Cloud - NetApp Fast-Start workshop

My favorite pass time in my childhood was looking at the pictures of Tintin comics. As a fan you will never forget Tintin, Snowy, Capt. Haddock, Prof. Calculus and crazy Thomson's. I read them all except the last one "Tintin in the Congo". I don't mind if somebody lends me this book to read.

In the "Destination Moon" it is Prof. Calculus who shows the way to the moon. He architects the mission and proves to the scientific community that anything is possible with proper vision, planning, teamwork and expertise.

Amazing stories with lots of fun to read even now.

 

    Reaching cloud with Fast-Start

"Transforming the Datacenter" has become mandatory to minimize costs, reduce complexities, risks and to improve service levels drastically. Transforming is like a journey that comprises of multiple steps of consolidation, virtualization, automation, IT-as-a-Service and Cloud.

Many questions to be answered during transformation

What are the steps to transform the datacenter?

How do I protect my existing IT investments?

How do I reduce risks and minimize disruptions?

How do I justify my costs?

Resources in the datacenter are generally over hyped. Except for the few critical applications servers, rest 80% of the datacenter resources are mostly under utilized. One of the customer who we recently interacted had over 300 servers.We found out that only 45 servers created over 90% of the load and rest 255 servers hardly had any load. Over the large monolithic storage frames that the customer had installed, 2/3 of the data was redundant and had unnecessary backup copies. The customer had been buying and buying stuff for their datacenter because none of vendors helped them to stop and change. All the vendors where keen on selling servers, network and storage rather than help them cut down gears. These scenarios are common in many large enterprise customers.

In order to avoid such above mentioned scenarios and maximize the existing datacenter performance NetApp conducts a consulting workshop known as Fast-Start Workshop. It helps customers in transforming the datacenter by providing steps to increasing storage efficiency, virtualize, build dynamic datacenter and cloud transformation. On top of money it saves serious carbon footprints, heat, power, cooling and helps going green. We got to be better citizens of the planet than increasing datacenter sizes.

A Fast-Start workshop is conducted by NetApp pool of technical experts for 2-4 days. The results speak for themselves and the good thing that it does not cost anything for the initial engagements.

 

                      Workshop Framework

I would encourage you as an enterprise customer to sign up for the Fast-Start workshop to jumpstart your savings in the datacenter. Visit http://netapp.com/faststart

Go Further, Faster with NetApp Fast-Start !

Seeding the cloud with ONTAP 8

In some places when rain does not turn up for long time, the cloud is seeded with silver iodide, dry ice and other substances. The drought hit areas have no other ways of survival and without water it could soon turn into desert. The method of changing the cloud environment so that it pours rain is called cloud seeding. One such example of un-seeding of the cloud was done during 2008 Beijing Olympics to avoid rain during Opening ceremony.

 

      Cloud Seeding - ONTAP 8.0 similarity

Cloud computing has a close similarity so far.  There has been more buzzwords than reality.
Generally I have customers who ask me "Does NetApp play in the cloud?"
I ask them in return "What in their perspective is called cloud?".

Every customer had their own versions of cloud and on further discussions we could summarize cloud definitions. It is enabling IT as a service. It is like getting compute resources for applications as and when the business needs it Or I like to name it as "IT Nirvana".

With that being the definition, NetApp has been leading the cloud computing market for quite some time. In case you use an Yahoo Email or Photobucket, it runs of a NetApp cloud storage. Multimillion customers use NetApp leveraged Cloud every day in their life.

Is that all is Cloud computing? Some may claim so.

NetApp is moving few steps ahead by innovating a new operating system that is meant for Enterprise Cloud Computing services. ONTAP 8.0 is the cloud seeds.

Some of the new cloud enabled operating system features are

1) Secure Multi-Tenancy—Customers can deploy a shared, cost-effective infrastructure across separate
   user groups or enterprise customers with NetApp’s proven technology called MultiStore

2) Transparent Data Motion—Customers can achieve nondisruptively data access during mandatory shutdowns
   or upgrades and respond quickly and transparently within a single-site or across multi-site distributed deployments.

3) Service Automation—Customers can leverage a comprehensive set of role-based data management and monitoring tools to meter usage and enable a charge-back model, significantly reducing operational costs and improving service response time.

4) Storage Efficiency—Customers can improve ROI for raw storage purchases and reduce data center space, power, and cooling.

5) Integrated Data Protection—Customers can deploy built-in backup/recovery and business continuity capabilities, which are a necessity for shared infrastructures that must always be on

And how does ONTAP 8.0 empower the cloud

NetApp Data Motion™—
NetApp’s new data motion technology allows enterprises to move data nondisruptively across storage systems with zero application downtime. Now customers can eliminate the impact of planned maintenance outages in virtualized multi-tenant environments. NetApp Data Motion is the first solution of its kind in the storage industry and builds upon the NetApp unified storage architecture to greatly enhance availability for both internal and external cloud customers. Cool stuff! isn't it?

NetApp Data Motion -  Move Enterprise data nondisruptively

Also new innovative technologies and services in the ONTAP 8.0 with Performance Acceleration Module II, NetApp Dynamic Data Center (NDDC) Solution, NetApp Fast-Start Customer Workshop and DS4243 disk shelf. I will discuss in detail in my next write-up.

NetApp has seeded the Cloud with ONTAP 8.0 and benefits of cloud will rain on the Enterprise customers.

Go Further, Faster with NetApp !