Making storage investment easier to manage

NetApp has introduced NetApp Advance, a new portfolio of storage programs and guarantees to help customers cost-effectively future proof on-premises environments.

NetApp Advance evolves the storage lifecycle, allowing organisations the possibility to avoid complex, costly, and time-consuming refresh cycles by enabling ongoing, non-disruptive hardware upgrades – and ensures efficient, secure and sustainable storage with new guarantees offered to meet the needs of organisations today.

With simplified storage ownership and management, NetApp Advance can help to eliminate complex, time-consuming, and costly upgrade cycles while staying current with technology innovations. Organisations can choose on-premises or cloud storage options to future-proof environments to scale securely, seamlessly, and non-disruptively as they grow. Advance also brings sustainability and efficiency best practices and capabilities that continually improve energy efficiency and operational performance to reduce carbon footprint.

“NetApp Advance brings peace of mind to forward looking organisations in need of storage solutions that can adapt and scale as their business changes and grows,” said Sandeep Singh, Senior Vice President, Enterprise Storage at NetApp. “With NetApp Advance, we’re offering customers the confidence that their storage investment today will provide the flexibility to meet their hybrid cloud needs for the future.”

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 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 prior to 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.

Additionally, the NetApp Storage Lifecycle Program introduces the NetApp Cloud Advantage Program, which allows organizations to trade in controllers for full credit toward their choice of NetApp cloud solutions to enable easy scale out to the cloud in order to meet changing business demands – and two new guarantees to benefit organisations in need of agile 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. Available for all AFF all-flash systems.*

NetApp will also introduce a new Sustainability SLA for NetApp Keystone customers. Keystone comes standard with 99.999 percent data availability.* Now Keystone will provide a standard Watts/TB for each SLA-based performance level, with service credits available if those targets are not met. This new SLA is planned for availability in the first calendar quarter of 2023 and specific terms and conditions will apply.

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 organisation’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.

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