NetApp Advance: Next Level Hybrid Cloud Flexibility and Efficiency for Organizations

NetApp, Inc. announced the availability of NetApp Advance, a portfolio of storage programs and guarantees to help customers cost-effectively future proof on-premises environments.

Advance evolves the storage lifecycle, allowing organizations 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 organizations today.

With simplified storage ownership and management, Advance can help to eliminate complex, time-consuming, and costly upgrade cycles while staying current with technology innovations. Organizations 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.

“Advance brings peace of mind to forward looking organizations in need of storage solutions that can adapt and scale as their business changes and grows,” said Sandeep Singh, SVP, enterprise storage. “With 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.”

Benefits of Advance include:

Reducing the cost, complexity, and disruption of tech refreshes by buying once and evolving continuously.
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 Advance, Storage Lifecycle Program offers:

No additional cost non-disruptive upgrades to the latest storage controller technology every 3, 4, or 5 years
Option to upgrade controllers at only incremental cost prior to 3-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 and sustainable data center 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 AIOs 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 firm’s Storage Lifecycle Program introduces Cloud Advantage Program, which allows organizations to trade in controllers for full credit toward their choice of NetApp cloud solutions to enable scale out to the cloud in order to meet changing business demands – and 2 new guarantees to benefit organizations 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, the company will rectify this at no cost to the customer. Available for all AFF all-flash systems. ^(*)

The company will also introduce a Sustainability SLA for NetApp Keystone customers. Keystone comes standard with 99.999% data availability.⁽^*) Now it will provide a standard Watts/TB for each SLA-based performance level, with service credits available if those targets are not met. This SLA is planned for availability in the 1CQ23 and specific terms and conditions will apply.

With NetApp BlueXP, customers will soon have access to a Sustainability Dashboard – available for preview in the 1FQ24. 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 AIOs 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, Enterprise Vision Technologies. “With NetApp’s announcement of 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.”

Availability:

Advance is available.
Also announced, the upcoming availability of AFF C-Series, a family of capacity flash storage options that deliver lower cost all-flash storage, and AFF A150, an entry-level storage system in the AFF A-Series family of all-flash systems.