Considerations in
At NetDef, we’re all about
recommending the right solution for
you now and for the future.
The investment you make in your storage environment must support the needs of your organisation whatever happens in the future. Making the wrong investment could lead to capacity shortages, overwhelming storage administration burdens and failing service levels.
We have evaluated the market and believe that NetApp offers the best portfolio of products to provide the performance and flexibility our customers require at a competitive and realistic price point. So much so that we use it ourselves to host our infrastructure services on.
This document lays out the main discussion points around storage infrastructure challenges and explains how NetDef and NetApp address them in a way that helps us to
NetDef can help you take your storage infrastructure in a new direction,
challenging assumptions about what you can achieve and the
investment required to achieve it.
We can do this because we have a unique philosophy when it comes to storage:
We want to sell you less storage.
Our expertise will help you allocate your budget
efficiently and give you solutions that will put you in a great position for the future.
Where should you start when
it comes to re-evaluating your
storage strategy?
It stands to reason that if you carry on doing what you’ve always done and simply add more capacity to what you already have, you will carry on suffering from the same problems – just on a larger scale. For a
fundamental re-think, there are three main issues that need to be addressed when looking at your storage infrastructure.
1
Data capacity: You need to cope with your current dataneeds and prepare yourself for even more data in the future. Be sure you’re using the right hardware and spending the right amount of money for your needs – benefiting from cost saving technologies and techniques wherever they are appropriate.
2
Resources: managing your data is costing you time,money and manpower. To ensure maximum productivity of your people, you need to be sure that optimal processes are in place and that the tools being used are standardised where possible.
NetDef can provide you with a storage assessment service to properly analyse your current infrastructure and recommend the best course of action in the short, medium and long term for your organisation.
Your first consideration: Capacity
Your ambition: storing more on less for a low
budget start and easy future upgrades
Are you running into capacity issues? Are you finding it expensive to buy more storage, or finding that your current systems are limiting your expansion options?
Running out of storage capacity can be crippling – and it can be a financial burden to buy more. But having the resources to properly research the best path forward is a challenge in itself when you’re already over stretched. With NetApp technologies, we can offer you solutions that can give you the capacity you need that are not only affordable, but are also more powerful than other systems in their class.
From less than £10,000, we can provide you with no compromise unified storage with the capability to get more out of applications and improve storage efficiency.
+ With these storage-efficiency technologies, you can use up to 50% less storage in virtual server environments – guaranteed!
While we are confident that the NetApp
functionality will dramatically ease your management overheads, you may wish to engage NetDef’s Managed Services to look after your storage infrastructure on your behalf.
NetDef specialises in
providing a complete range of managed services to protect your corporate network and information assets.
Your second consideration: Resources
Management efficiencies put you in control
Your IT department needs to manage more than just storage and has to look beyond just data, to applications and other resources. Data doesn’t exist for itself. It’s there to be used. If your IT team is trying to manage data separately from the applications which use it, it could be causing a resource bottleneck.
You can’t afford to be encumbered by complicated storage management
NetDef can help you consolidate and virtualise to make your data- centre run more efficiently, more cost-effectively and free up your valuable personnel. The inherent value of NetApp’s capability to reduce the overall volume of data stored naturally leads to it being less to manage, but the benefits of the technology go much deeper than that.
Through integration with applications, automation of repetitive tasks and elimination of extraneous processes, we can:
• Reduce management overhead by 60%
• Cut provisioning time from hours or days to minutes The great thing is you don’t have to buy separate products to get all these capabilities. This comes built in to any NetApp solution
The best way to gain an understanding of the simplicity of the NetApp tools is to see them in action at one of our quarterly Demo Café Briefings.
These half day events – run at our offices in Daresbury – are designed to offer you face to face time with a NetApp
Systems Engineer who will show you how you can store more data than the physical capacity you’ve bought while simplifying management, using less power and less space.
Release resources from inefficient
backup and recovery processes
Many businesses are facing challenges when it comes to protecting their data. It’s often the case that midsized businesses don’t have a solid plan to protect their data if disaster strikes. Backup and restore operations are seen as complicated and resource intensive, they take too long, and they often interrupt the normal running of IT.
NetApp backup, restore, and archiving processes are different.
With NetApp solutions to safeguard your critical data, you can drive operational efficiencies by reducing backup time and improving data recovery – all while cutting infrastructure, tape and administrative costs.
NetApp has some fantastic technologies that allow you to back up in minutes rather than hours, and restore in a fraction of the time you’ve become used to – all without disrupting the normal flow of your business. These solutions also offer great off-site, disaster-recovery options that can be installed in a similar manner to your regular systems. They cost less than competing solutions and don’t require specialist infrastructure.
+ We can also help you achieve high-performance data archiving and compliance, while reducing your costs.
At NetDef, we pride
ourselves on our ability to deliver innovative
solutions to our customers and to forge long-standing relationships.
Many of our larger customers have been working with us for 10 years or more – testament to our commitment to customer service and technical excellence.
Your third consideration: Innovation
Keeping storage infrastructure as simple and
powerful as you need it to be
Who knows what your IT needs are going to be in 5 years’ time? Maybe you will have grown beyond any perceived future capacity needs, maybe you’ll be handling and manipulating your data in ways that you’d never think possible today? You could even be using applications and handling workloads that are completely alien to your current setup.
How can your storage and data management stay flexible when the future is so uncertain?
That’s where we come in. Along with NetApp and our other technology partners, we offer solutions that are future-proof. You’ll be able to do what you want – when you want – with on-demand solutions that scale with your needs. And by taking virtualised storage to the next level, you can have limitless capacity and utility.
Next Steps
Storage Assessment Service
The Storage Assessment Service is a one or two day on-site activity which will provide you with a detailed report laying out the resources and processes employed within your storage infrastructure alongside our recommendations for improvement and investment.
• Utilisation of existing storage environment • Power consumption and system capacity • Availability / downtime
• Performance of current storage system • Capacity optimisation
• Management of storage environment
• Total cost of ownership / return on IT investment
Following the on-site activity, we will provide you with a detailed report to allow you to easily understand the dynamics of your storage infrastructure. We will also provide you with a range of recommendations encompassing operational and infrastructure adjustments based on our findings.
Demo Café Briefing
This half day event – run quarterly at our offices in Daresbury – is designed to offer you face to face time with a NetApp Systems Engineer to discuss your IT requirements and business objectives.
We’ll show you how you can store more data than the physical capacity you’ve bought while simplifying management, using less power and less space.
Agenda
09.45 Registration and coffee
10.00 Introductions to NetDef & NetApp
10.30 Unified Storage: achieving scalability & flexibility
10.45 Interactive Live Demonstration – Features included in the demo are: Storage Efficiency: RAID-DP, Thin Provisioning, Snapshots, Deduplication, Thin Replication, FlexClone
Managed Services
For some companies, IT systems managed in-house can become a burden; tying up resources and incurring additional costs. Other companies may lack the in-house resources and expertise in the first place to manage the tasks themselves. In either scenario, outsourcing all or some of your IT management will ease the burden on your IT resources allowing greater flexibility for staff to focus on delivering core business services to your customers.
All our services are underpinned by our expertise in systems management, monitoring and support. We improve your security stance and simplify management, providing guaranteed response times from our managed services team to ensure continuous, secure operation of your internet services. Based on experience and real customer feedback, we estimate that we cut around half of the cost of in-house service provision while providing a better, more consistent service.
About NetDef
NetDef is a leading managed service provider supporting a wide range of clients in the public and private sectors. Founded in 1996, we work with medium to large customers across the UK delivering and
managing highly secure IT infrastructure solutions.
We pride ourselves on our ability to deliver innovative solutions to our customers and to forge long-standing relationships. Many of our larger customers have been working with us for 10 years or more – testament to our commitment to customer service and technical excellence.
