Several Service Providers Choose NetApp

Economic and competitive pressures are forcing organisations to seek alternatives to align their IT infrastructure to their business needs. These companies are increasingly turning to cloud services to gain efficiencies and respond to today’s changing business requirements. Service providers are an important pathway to these customers, and they play a key role in bringing cloud services to market and helping customers make infrastructure decisions to accelerate their businesses.

As part of the company’s strategy to broaden and leverage its diverse pathways to reach customers, NetApp announced that several service providers are collaborating with NetApp to deliver a range of cloud services that help customers transition to a flexible and efficient shared IT infrastructure – the foundation for cloud computing. These service providers are an integral part of an expanding partner ecosystem benefiting from the NetApp Partner Program for Service Providers. This program helps partners increase their business and take advantage of the market shift to cloud services. Unlike other vendors, NetApp collaborates with service providers and currently, does not compete by offering proprietary cloud services.

Service providers are collaborating with NetApp to build, deploy, and sell differentiated cloud service offerings, which help customers transition to a flexible and efficient shared IT infrastructure. These service providers include BlueFire, Interactive, Internet Initiative Japan, Iron Mountain, Logicalis, Quest, Rackspace, Siemens IT Solutions and Services, and Terremark.

NetApp and its ecosystem of solution partners offer a diverse portfolio of enterprise-class cloud services, including application development and testing, backup, collaboration, desktop, disaster recovery, infrastructure, messaging, storage, and SAP application-based services to help enterprises reduce costs and enhance agility.

Julie Parrish, vice president of Global Channel Sales, NetApp, said: "NetApp is focused on creating opportunities to collaborate with our solution partners to deliver compelling, complementary, and differentiated cloud solutions. The NetApp Partner Program for Service Providers is one of several ways we work with solution partners to help them increase their revenue and grow their businesses. Our success in attracting a strong global ecosystem of service providers is a testament to the unique value proposition that NetApp delivers as a partner of choice to accelerate adoption of public and private clouds."

Program Detail

• The NetApp Partner Program for Service Providers enables service providers who join the program to build differentiated, enterprise-class cloud service offerings that help customers move to a shared IT infrastructure, allowing them to operate profitably based on low-cost and predictable service levels.
• Service providers who join the program benefit from access to a range of tools and programs delivered by NetApp to help differentiate their services, speed time to market, and grow their revenues. These tools and programs include technical training and service benefits, as well as marketing and sales support.
• The program allows value-added resellers to align with NetApp preferred service providers to offer cloud solutions to the end customer, enabling them to meet the demand for cloud services and to grow their business without investing in the new data centres, infrastructure, and resources needed to become a cloud service provider.

Jason Serda, managing director and CIO, BlueFire, said: "The NetApp Partner Program for Service Providers provided the resources to enable us to develop a next generation cloud and performance storage solution. The ability to provide a secure shared infrastructure across six of our data centres provides our clients a no compromise approach to outsourcing their primary storage. We were determined to design a storage solution that gave them more than what they could build themselves. Dynamic on demand provisioning, reporting and secure management, enterprise SLAs and access to storage by tier, matching performance to application, creation of volumes, snapshots, remote replication and remote snapshots powered by NetApp. The most unique aspect of working with NetApp is the go-to-market partnership which expands our sales footprint and further supports our success and has created a benchmark for strategic relationship with our vendors."

Simon Durkin, director of Sales, Interactive, Australia, said: "Interactive is proud to offer world-class cloud solutions with NetApp as our trusted storage partner. The NetApp Partner Program for Service Providers gives us access to even more tools and processes that improve our cloud value proposition. To be successful in the cloud market you need to be able to demonstrate that you can utilize your resources effectively and thereby provide your customers the best solutions at a cost effective price. Together with NetApp, we have a winning team."

Kokichi Matsumoto, executive officer, Internet Initiative Japan Inc., said: "NetApp was a natural partner of choice for building the IIJ GIO Storage Service due to NetApp’s powerful efficiency technologies and integrated data protection capabilities. Secure multi-tenancy capabilities allow simultaneous access to storage for multiple users without compromising security. Integrated data protection assures backup and recovery to meet our customers’ stringent recovery point and recovery time objectives. As a result, our customers enjoy the cost benefits of a shared on-demand cloud storage infrastructure with enterprise-class data security and availability."

Todd Koopersmith, vice president of Corporate and Business Development, Iron Mountain, said: "NetApp’s unique approach to working with its partner community is proof that it is committed to helping us accelerate our business. As a member of the NetApp Partner Program for Service Providers, we now have access to a variety of tools and support that will help us differentiate our services, improve time to market and allow us to more effectively address our customers’ information management service needs."

Chris Gabriel, director of Solutions and Marketing, Logicalis, U.K., said: "The NetApp flexible and efficient technologies are fundamental to our solutions vision and allow us to service the cloud needs of our customers for both on-site cloud solutions and hosted cloud services. Working with a single partner who understands the journey our customers will make to cloud was vital for Logicalis. NetApp delivers a complete vision for cloud and is trusted by our customers as a partner of choice. What we can do with NetApp simply isn’t possible with other vendors. Innovating with a trusted partner gives our customers a strong level of confidence as they continue to adopt new cloud services."

Tim Burke, president and CEO, Quest, said: "Quest has offered managed and cloud services cost-effectively for many years serving hundreds of clients. Our partnership with NetApp opens a world of increased secure cloud services including data protection, desktop, and development and testing on NetApp shared storage infrastructure that results in great cost savings for our enterprise users – up to 70% less than most alternatives. It’s a partnership we highly value."

Robert Fuller, vice president of Worldwide Channel Sales, Rackspace Hosting, said: "Our relationship with NetApp has enabled Rackspace channel partners to offer their enterprise customers access to NetApp’s innovative storage and data management solutions. Paired with our hosted and cloud solutions, this can allow the end customer to shift risk away from their business and eliminate the need for large capital expenses for hardware and data centres. The Rackspace Enterprise Data Replication Service is the latest addition to our portfolio of NetApp-based services and provides our customers and partners with real-time data replication and rapid data recovery – a critical component of a sound business continuity and disaster recovery plan – so they can remain focused on their core business objectives."

Bruce Coughlin, vice president, Portfolio and Innovation, Siemens IT Solutions and Services, said: "NetApp has been instrumental in helping us build our Infrastructure as a Service solution. We partner with NetApp because its technical approach is efficient, flexible, and scalable. The NetApp unified architecture offers us the option to rapidly deploy future services without continually re-evaluating storage capabilities. In a dynamic market this type of flexibility and agility is invaluable for addressing our customers rapidly changing business requirements."

Stacy Hayes, vice president of Strategic Alliances, Terremark, said: "NetApp extends efficiency and flexibility benefits throughout our cloud service portfolio which today includes Infrastructure, DR and Backup/Recovery. By utilizing key capabilities from NetApp such as secure multi-tenancy, customers leveraging our Enterprise Cloud can have their own secure infrastructure island provisioned in about an hour with all the features of an individual, dedicated SAN including Disaster Recovery, scalability, and more. Because the infrastructure is shared we minimize our cost of goods sold and pass these efficiency savings to our customers. The support throughout the service lifecycle from product development to sales and marketing is also a key differentiator and one of the important reasons we chose to partner with NetApp."

John Murphy, executive vice president and founder, Advanced Systems Group, Inc., said: "Our primary goal is to design and deliver IT solutions that give our enterprise customers a competitive business edge. By leveraging cloud services from NetApp Service Provider Partners, we are quickly expanding our solution portfolio, finding new sales opportunities, and engaging with new types of clients without the investment of building our own cloud services. We also are taking advantage of the programs NetApp has built that provide for mutual partnering with our sales teams."

Larry Gentry, president, Custom Storage, said:" Our objective has always been to provide industry leading IT solutions that provide our enterprise, commercial, and SLED customers a competitive technical advantage – whether they are operating on premise or in an external cloud. Our ability to leverage cloud services from NetApp Service Provider Partners, provided by an industry leader such as Terremark, has enabled us to quickly expand our solution portfolio to meet the needs of our existing customers, find new sales opportunities with new customers, and grow our business without the investment of building our own cloud services."

Chris Aliberti, senior vice president of National Sales, Insight Integrated Systems, said: "We are committed to delivering IT solutions that meet the needs of our customers regardless of their physical location. With NetApp as a longstanding partner and our own experts in the field, we have had tremendous success in delivering traditional, cloud-based, and blended data storage solutions that provide a range of compelling benefits. With the new year upon us, we are seeing even more demand for exciting new projects that will further our relationship and grow our leadership in the market."

John Woodall, vice president of Engineering, Integrated Archive Systems, Inc., said: "Our customers are re-tooling their data centre strategies to leverage efficiency at all levels of the tech stack and to consolidate on as many dimensions as possible. We believe this strategy for most customers will be a mix of highly efficient, virtualized and integrated ‘private cloud’ initiatives combined with complimentary ‘public cloud’ adoption. IAS’s ability to leverage and offer enterprise-grade cloud offerings to our customers via NetApp Service Provider Partners gives us and our customers the flexibility and agility we both are looking for. For IAS, this allows us to provide a richer and deeper set of cloud offerings to our portfolio faster, with lower risk."

Jason Gress, president, InterVision System Technologies, Inc., said: "As the trusted advisor of our enterprise customers, we strive to deliver IT solutions that provide the maximum return on investment whether maintained in the enterprise, or in the cloud. Partnering with NetApp’s Cloud Service Provider Partners has empowered us to scale a solutions portfolio based on our customer’s needs now and into the future."