NetApp Advance to provide organizations with enhanced hybrid cloud flexibility and efficiency

NetApp, a global, cloud-led, data-centric software company, announced the availability of NetApp Advance, a new portfolio of storage programs and guarantees to help customers cost-effectively future-proof on-premises environments.

By enabling ongoing, non-disruptive hardware upgrades, NetApp Advance advances the storage lifecycle and allows businesses to avoid complicated, expensive, and time-consuming refresh cycles. It also ensures effective, secure, and long-lasting storage with new guarantees designed to meet businesses’ needs today.

NetApp Advance simplifies the ownership and management of storage, which can reduce the complexity, time, and cost associated with upgrade cycles. By using Advance, organizations can stay up-to-date with technological innovations and choose between on-premises or cloud storage options to ensure future scalability and security without disruption. Additionally, Advance incorporates sustainability and efficiency best practices and capabilities that enhance energy efficiency and operational performance, resulting in a reduction of carbon footprint.

Tambi Baik, Country Manager, Saudi Arabia & Regional Manager Enterprise, GCC Region at NetApp said “Wherever there is a need of storage solutions that can help progressive and enterprising organizations to adapt and scale as their business grows, NetApp Advance offers customers with the confidence that the investment they make in storage today, will help them in the future with meeting the needs of flexibility required for their hybrid cloud.”

New benefits of NetApp Advance include:

• Reducing the cost, complexity, and disruption of tech refreshes by buying once and evolving continuously.

• Greatly reducing the risk previously associated with the journey to the hybrid cloud with the flexibility to easily scale out to the cloud if or when business demands it.

Part of NetApp Advance, the new NetApp Storage Lifecycle Program offers:

• No additional cost non-disruptive upgrades to the latest storage controller technology every three, four, or five years

• Option to upgrade controllers at only incremental cost before three-year renewal.

• Optional capacity refresh allowing customers to replace lower capacity drives as part of a storage refresh, so customers never have to buy the same capacity twice and can achieve a more efficient & sustainable data centre footprint.

• Remotely managed software updates including non-disruptive ONTAP software upgrades packed with new capabilities and enhancements.

• Premier-level support services, with Active IQ and Cloud Insights that enable full-stack visibility and AIOps to streamline observability of the infrastructure beyond the storage layer in a single interface to quickly pinpoint issues and simplify troubleshooting. While ONTAP Essentials provides detailed overviews of ONTAP inventories, workloads, and data protection.

The NetApp Storage Lifecycle Program also introduces the NetApp Cloud Advantage Program, which enables organisations to trade in controllers for full credit towards their preferred NetApp cloud solutions to enable easy scale-out to the cloud to meet changing business demands. Additionally, two new guarantees are introduced to benefit organisations that require flexible and efficient storage consumption options and models.

NetApp’s 4:1 SAN Storage Efficiency Guarantee offers that if workload efficiency goals are not met, NetApp will rectify this at no cost to the customer.

NetApp Keystone customers will soon have access to a new Sustainability SLA, which will come with a standard Watts/TB for each performance level based on SLA. Keystone already offers 99.999% data availability as standard, and the new SLA will include service credits in case the performance targets are not met. The new Sustainability SLA is expected to be available in the first quarter of 2023, and there will be specific terms and conditions that apply to it.

With NetApp BlueXP, customers will soon have access to a new, industry-first Sustainability Dashboard – available for preview in the first quarter of NetApp’s fiscal year 2024. This dashboard provides a holistic view of an organization’s IT environment with real data measuring power, energy and heat usage to deliver a sustainability scorecard. By offering actionable insights with AIOps to improve their overall score and reduce their storage carbon footprint, organizations can simply and easily monitor and achieve their IT sustainability goals.

Scott Gelb, Solutions Architect at Enterprise Vision Technologies said “As a NetApp partner, EVT is helping our joint customers optimize their IT environment and accelerate their journey to the cloud.”

Gelb added “With NetApp’s announcement of NetApp Advance, we’re now perfectly positioned to help customers do just that by providing a flexible path to non-disruptive upgrades of their on-premises hardware systems or to right-size their hybrid cloud environments as they scale out to any cloud with credits toward their choice of NetApp cloud solutions. By future-proofing their investment with Advance, we can limit risk and offer infrastructure agility as their business evolves.”