The challenge
Enterprises need data center resources such as storage, compute, and networking gear, and acquisition of these resources is dominated by a capital expense (capex) budget approach. However, vendors of these resources are fighting for a share of an ever-shrinking capex budget, making choices difficult for ITOps teams.
The opportunity
Enterprise customers have contractual financial commitments to the hyperscalers in order to secure more favorable terms and discounts. These cloud financial commitments include Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC), AWS Enterprise Discount Program (EDP), and Google Cloud Committed Use Discounts (CUD). These commitments normally exist outside of the data center budget and can be applied to offset the cost of data center storage and workloads, if the technology allows it. This is a negotiated contractual commitment to spend a certain amount of money (millions of dollars), typically over 3 to 5 years, to one or more hyperscalers in exchange for a significant discount. Unlike a "budget," this is a commitment to spend or be penalized. NetApp® flash systems save capex by tapping into the cloud commit budget to pay for capacity and backup.
Top 5 reasons to leverage 1 workload, 2 budgets.
- Only NetApp flash systems can take advantage of the cloud commit budget to enable necessary services such as backup, tiering, and compliance without touching the data center capex budget.
- NetApp helps organizations meet their cloud commit goals, and the ITOps team stays within budget.
- NetApp flash systems can natively invoke BlueXP™ backup and restore capability to protect data by backing it up to the cloud with the tightest RTO and RPO in the industry, and in a secure fashion.
- NetApp flash systems can natively invoke the BlueXP tiering capability to move infrequently accessed data to inexpensive cloud storage without changing applications, workflow, or user experience.
- NetApp flash systems not only have the industry’s leading autonomous ransomware protection, they can also invoke NetApp Cloud Insight Workload Security to protect against insider threats-- something that other vendors can’t do.
Customer examples
A global mechanical and plant engineering firm used Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment for BlueXP tiering and backup, which drove on-premises storage sale of FAS2720, FAS8300, AFF A250, and AFF A400. A large multinational oil and gas company used the AWS Enterprise Discount Program for BlueXP tiering and copy/sync, allowing them to balance a cloud-first mandate coupled with capex freeze. This freed up capacity on AFF systems, which was used to migrate on-premises SAP data from Dell EMC to NetApp.
For more information
To learn more, visit the NetApp BlueXP page and the Cloud Services page.