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As the shift towards the cloud continues, enterprises that still need to choose a cloud provider, or who are thinking of moving to a new one, have difficult decisions to make when it comes to their storage demands. Will the new cloud platform provide for all of the enterprise’s needs? What kind of changes will have to be made to the existing applications to use the storage offered in the cloud? And how much will all of it cost? These are crucial questions to answer when undertaking an AWS migration.
As the first major cloud provider, Amazon Web Services (AWS) innovated the operational efficiency, performance, agility, and cost savings that define cloud deployment and is still trusted by more enterprises than any other cloud to this day. The major role that storage had to play in that was clear from the beginning as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) was the first service AWS made available, followed by the even-more powerful Amazon Elastic Block Storage (AWS EBS).
But while AWS cloud storage offers significant benefits, users may still find themselves looking to enhance their deployment’s storage management capabilities for availability, data protection, disaster recovery, backup and archiving, data sharing, storage efficiency, containerization, and hybrid deployment.
How are users on AWS addressing these challenges? In many cases, they are turning to NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP.
In our new ebook we take a detailed look at these companies, but you can read on here to meet some of the thousands of customers who are getting the most out of their AWS deployments with the help of Cloud Volumes ONTAP.
Get the full eBook Cloud Volumes ONTAP for AWS: 10 Customer Success Stories here.
Cloud Volumes ONTAP for AWS Case Studies
Officeworks: Automated Tiering, Kubernetes Persistent Storage
Officeworks is an Australian brick-and-mortar and online retailer of office supplies, furniture, technology, and student supplies. It sells more than 40,000 products, employs 8,000 people, and is committed to operating a sustainable, responsible, and community-oriented business.
Committed to a cloud-first strategy, Officeworks’ initial Cloud Volumes ONTAP use case was archiving cold data on cost-effective Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) object storage. Cloud Volumes ONTAP then automatically tiers data back and forth between the capacity tier and the Amazon Elastic Block Service (EBS) performance tier, as needed.
As they continued to use Cloud Volumes ONTAP as a springboard to push more and more on-premises data to AWS, they found that Cloud Volumes ONTAP’s deduplication feature, which is not available natively on AWS, reduced their cold data footprint by 20-30%.
Using Cloud Volumes ONTAP, Officeworks gains:
- Cost-effective and low-maintenance hosting of their NFS, SMB and CIFS file shares as part of their disaster recovery (DR) plan.
- Faster development time through FlexClone data cloning technology.
- Dynamic Kubernetes persistent volume provisioning via NetApp Trident.
Read more on the Officeworks uses Cloud Volumes ONTAP here.
D2L: AWS High Availability and Data Protection
D2L (Desire to Learn) makes distance learning possible for grades K-12, higher education, and corporate customers. In today’s current environment, that’s more important than ever. D2L supports users everywhere, logging in to take classes in schools and universities all around the world. Their market is not only competitive, it’s also facing increased usage demands that require extreme availability and business continuity processes.
D2L turned to Cloud Volumes ONTAP for a more inexpensive way to store the massive amounts of data they had to store on-prem (learning materials for classes, coursework, records and more that totaled in the petabytes). They are a learning company, not an IT company, and their focus was being diverted to maintaining this massive data center footprint. To refocus their budgets and innovation, D2L adopted the AWS cloud with Cloud Volumes ONTAP.
The benefits D2L gains from Cloud Volumes ONTAP for AWS are:
- 10x increased storage scale
- Easy and safe migration of petabytes of production data to AWS using SnapMirror® data replication.
- High availability with a Cloud Volumes ONTAP HA pair deployment.
- 60% cost savings with Cloud Volumes ONTAP’s storage efficiencies.
- Enhanced data protection with strong and cost-effective AWS backup, recovery, and DR capabilities. Quick rollbacks with zero data loss are now easier than ever.
- Centralized hybrid data management and operational efficiencies to implement a scalable all-cloud platform that frees up resources for innovation.
Find out all the details of the D2L case study with Cloud Volumes ONTAP here.
Eidos Media: AWS for Scale and DevOps Innovation
EidosMedia hosts a content creation and delivery platform that is used by some 32K+ writers and creators daily, managing more than 280K projects that reach some 65M+ readers all over the world. EidosMedia is trusted by numerous major enterprises for their media services, including the Dow Jones, The Financial Times, Deutsche Post DHL, and Le Monde to name just a few.
The business challenges that EidosMedia was faced with were mainly about scale. With the amount of media they hosted, they needed to adopt a cloud platform that could scale up infinitely, add agility, and help innovate in their highly competitive market. The latter meant adopting a SaaS model that could increase their ability to publish globally and decrease their development time.
The solution was to turn to AWS and Cloud Volumes ONTAP in a highly available configuration. This gave them benefits including:
- High availability with Cloud Volumes ONTAP HA pairs, where if one node crashes, workloads immediately and automatically failover to another node, ensuring continuous operations and fault-tolerant business continuity.
- True hybrid data management, with workloads able to move seamlessly from on-premises to the cloud and back across the NetApp Data Fabric leveraging NetApp SnapMirror replication and data mobility technology.
- Shortened development cycles for dev/test environments using FlexClone®. Eidos can easily spin up and tear down environment copies by cloning writable volumes instantly and at zero capacity no matter the size of the source data.
Read the full EidosMedia case study here.
The UK’s Cordant Group, is an integrated services provider, lending their support to enterprises for various needs, including service design seamlessness, recruitment, and designing client structures to be more profitable and more performant.Cordant: File Sharing in the Cloud with AWS
When Cordant decided to move to AWS, their requirements were considerable. They had to move the entirety of their considerable IT infrastructure and their thin client services with Citrix to the cloud from their existing on-prem sites. It was also important to avoid rearchitecting or refactoring their applications.
After the initial AWS migration to a cloud infrastructure, they decided to replicate their physical storage environment in the cloud. However, they found that the Windows DFS file share solution offered by AWS was too restrictive. Cloud Volumes ONTAP offered more.
By using Cloud Volumes ONTAP, Cordant found a way to complement AWS native storage services to gain the following advantages:
- Cloud file shares that support all the leading file share protocols: SMB / CIFS, NFS, and iSCSI.
- SQL database backups via SnapManager for SQL Server that are then mirrored to the cloud for robust, cost-effective data protection and disaster recovery.
- Cloud data storage cost-saving storage efficiencies reduced Cordant’s data storage footprint and costs on AWS by 50%.
- A unified and familiar hybrid data management interface for simple installation, resource assignment, and data provisioning in NetApp Cloud Manager.
- End-to-end visibility into their storage requirements across all environments.
Find out more about how Cordant uses Cloud Volumes ONTAP here.
Monash University: Easy AWS Migration, Reduced Storage Costs
Monash University is the largest university in Australia. Educating 80,000+ students in campus locations on four different continents, Monash is ranked in the top 1% of universities across the globe.
When Monash University made the strategic decision to move to a cloud-only strategy based on a multicloud model (using AWS and Azure), they used Cloud Volumes ONTAP’s intuitive interface and its data replication features to migrate 3,500 workloads from their on-prem systems to the AWS cloud within a 12-month period.
They continue to reap the following benefits:
- Saving 25% in AWS storage costs thanks to Cloud Volumes ONTAP’s deduplication and compression capabilities.
- Reduced environment provisioning time from months to minutes with 1-click full-stack provisioning.
- Eliminated over-provisioning and extra upfront costs through thin provisioning of a shared pool of storage resources.
- Data tiering between Amazon S3 and Amazon EBS gives Monash a capacity tier for inexpensive long-term storage which can be accessed automatically upon demand.
Read the full Monash University case study here.
Read More on Cloud Data Storage Challenges and Cloud Volumes ONTAP for AWS Case Studies
You can find the rest of the Cloud Volumes ONTAP for AWS case studies and much more about the challenges that new and existing AWS users are facing in their cloud deployments in the complete eBook.
Download Cloud Volumes ONTAP for AWS: 10 Customer Success Stories here.
For more on AWS migration, check out the rest of these blogs:
- AWS Migration: Understanding the Process and Solving 5 Key Challenges
- 5 Optimal Approaches for Your Hyper-V to AWS Migration Strategy
- 5 Steps to the Cloud: AWS Migration Checklist
- AWS Migration Strategy: The 6 Rs in Depth
- AWS Storage Gateway: Connecting Your On-Premise Storage to the Amazon Cloud
- One-Click SAP System Migration to the Cloud
- AWS Cloud Migration Services: Don’t Migrate Alone
- Migrating Physical Server to AWS: Now Free with AWS CloudEndure
Or if you’re ready to get started, try a free 30-day subscription to Cloud Volumes ONTAP now.
