In conversation with Laurence James, NetApp Product Alliances and Solutions Marketing Manager for UK&Ireland.When you examine the enterprise network market at the moment one of the standout trends is the fact that customers are far savvier about what represents the right type of option for their business.
I’ve seen customers who have a three way model for example, under which they firstly have the data and functions clearly mapped out which they would like to keep on premise. Then they’re using a partner to carry out certain features and functions in an ‘as-a-service’ manner.Finally their developers have gone to a cloud services provider to help spin up the right development environment really quickly if needed. I’ve chatted to a number of customers running that model lately and the challenge for them is consistency of data transport between that three way system – which is one of the challenges we’ve been very concentrated on of late as well.That type of nuanced plan is something that may have been a rarity in previous years but thankfully that’s no longer the case.From a storage point of view in particular, Irish customers realise that a review of the current systems being employed can have a positive impact and that even some minor changes can make a huge difference to the efficiency of their network.
Avnet supplies the Irish market with NetApp’s range of storage options and one which we’ve noticed gaining plenty of attention of late is the complete refresh undertaken on our Fabric-Attached Storage (FAS) option to help IT efficiency, business agility, high application uptime, and simplified data management
FAS becomes an integral part of an enterprise-class storage area network (SAN) as well as acting as a networked storage appliance. It can serve storage over a network using file-based protocols such as NFS, CIFS, FTP, TFTP, and HTTP.
In addition, Irish customers can take advantage of our flagship operating system – Data ONTAP – which is a system which really defines the personality for the storage it’s controlling. A highly customised operating system, it was originally designed by NetApp founders David Hitz and James Lau.
Data ONTAP gets rid of things like de-duplication and compression as well as giving you thin provisioning capabilities in addition to other features. Using these features, you’re helping to manage resources a lot more intelligently, and within an Irish context in particular – where the SME is the prevalent business size – it should be noted that these features can be optimised whether you’re at a high-end or entry level in terms of your storage needs.
These type of options are important in a market where – from what we’ve seen and heard – both in the SME space as well as at enterprise level, organisations are growing and with that they’ve tended to grow their storage organically alongside that.
To ensure that continued growth and development of those small, medium and large businesses runs smoothly, partnering with company who can offer significantly advanced storage options is a must.
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