While the past year has been a challenging one in France, I was delighted to recently read an article in Reuters stating that in spite of difficulties and restrictions due to the pandemic, consumer confidence in France is on the rise. That is great news. A lot of the optimism is due to people being less fearful of unemployment. With many companies moving to the cloud, employees have been able to continue working remotely. NetApp has been actively partnering with Microsoft to improve work-from-home conditions using our secure, high-speed technology options.
By making it easier than ever for companies to implement secure and efficient remote work policies, Microsoft and NetApp are helping companies around the world continue to do business. Azure NetApp Files, a high-performance, fully managed shared file service, is helping significantly. Businesses are running even complex workloads such as SAP and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) in the cloud, increasing performance and reducing costs.
With so many people needing to work remotely, we have accelerated our schedule to open new Azure NetApp Files regions around the world. I am now very happy to announce that we have just launched our first region in France. In Europe we now have regions in France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Ireland, London, and Wales.
Last year, one of our distribution customers was able to migrate 14,000 employees to Microsoft’s Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) in a single weekend thanks to Azure NetApp Files. At a time when the health and safety of employees was on the line, Azure NetApp Files vastly expedited this critical migration.
This migration ensured business continuity, not just for our customers but also for their customers. This was a major priority since many of their customers are frontline healthcare companies and essential service providers.
Our dual protocol feature means that employees can access Linux and Windows files at the same time, which has become increasingly important with so many employees working remotely.
Of paramount importance to many businesses is where their data resides; they need to know that their data is protected on native soil. For these companies, the new Azure NetApp Files region in France is great news since it means that French data will be housed on French soil. In addition, Azure NetApp Files is fully compliant with all GDPR regulations.
One of our European-based multinational manufacturing firms wanted to vacate its primary data center and transition to the cloud by mid-2020. “SAP is mission-critical for us. Azure NetApp Files allowed us to migrate it to Azure without compromising performance and reduced our backup time for the SAO environment from over seven hours to just 30 minutes. The benefits of Azure NetApp Files in terms of performance and agility were obvious right away,” the customer said. In fact, the performance benefits were obvious so quickly that after initially moving 20 TB of data to Azure NetApp Files, they increased this amount by more than 2000% in the first 90 days.
The three major benefits of Azure NetApp Files are performance, performance, performance, and most of our customers report better performance in the cloud than they had on premises. Azure NetApp Files combines high performance with ultra low latency, even for the most challenging applications such as SAP. In fact, Azure NetApp Files is the only public cloud-based storage service that has is certified for use with SAP HANA production databases.
You need reliability, so we provide a 99.99% uptime guarantee. According to Aberdeen Research, unplanned downtime costs a staggering $260,000 an hour across all industries. Availability is as important to us as it is to you.
Azure NetApp Files provides three performance tiers: Standard, Premium, and Ultra. You can scale up and down as your performance needs change, as often as they change. Adjust tiers quickly and easily on the fly, so you never pay for more performance than you need.
Azure NetApp Files is simple to set up and manage and requires no refactoring. Get started and realize cost savings and increased productivity right away.
With increased focus on remote work as well as accelerated time frames for cloud migrations, Azure NetApp Files has been expanding its service as quickly as possible to keep pace with demand. In addition to France, we provide service in many parts of Europe as well as in the U.K., U.S., Canada, UAE, and Asia-Pacific. See our global regions map.
Contact Sales to register (en français Inscrivez-vous ici) and get high-performance Azure NetApp Files working for you.