Going all in with cloud deployment isn’t an option for every organization. While some prefer to retain a partial on-prem footprint for proprietary reasons, others can be limited due to regulatory compliance, security requirements, or performance concerns. Yet the cloud still has advantages these organizations may want to leverage. Adopting a hybrid cloud management strategy offers a solution and Cloud Volumes ONTAP can help make that happen.
In this post, we’ll go over how five enterprise-grade companies successfully used NetApp’s Cloud Volumes ONTAP to migrate part of their data storage from on-prem to the cloud for a customized hybrid solution.
In this post, we’ll cover the following topics and customer stories:
The Challenges of Hybrid Storage Deployment for Enterprises
A hybrid cloud solution deployment comes with a set of challenges:
- Data mobility: Ensuring data can move between environments quickly, efficiently, and seamlessly.
- Security: Enforcing data protection and security features across multiple, hybrid infrastructures, including access control, data encryption, ransomware protection, lifecycle management policies, and more.
- Collaborative data: Allowing access for multiple clients to collaborate on the same data set, regardless of whether it’s on-prem or in the cloud, while keeping the data consistent and performant.
- Operational complexity: Understanding the policies of the new cloud providers and establishing new processes for provisioning, data protection, monitoring, billing and cost management.
- Intricate data management: Integrating and synchronizing the data sets that are spread across different environments.
- Employee training: Training IT teams with the necessary skills to manage complex cloud structures—meaning teams need to be specially trained or new employees with specific knowledge need to be onboarded.
Fortunately, NetApp has a convenient way for organizations to overcome these challenges and bridge the gap between on-prem and cloud environments with Cloud Volumes ONTAP.
Hybrid Cloud Storage Success Stories with Cloud Volumes ONTAP
Cloud Volumes ONTAP and NetApp Cloud Manager provide enterprises with a reliable option for hybrid cloud storage management on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. With Cloud Volumes ONTAP, businesses can continue to retain high levels of data performance, bring down costs, and ensure data is protected.
In this section, we’ll look at five different businesses that successfully used NetApp’s Cloud Volumes ONTAP to adopt a hybrid cloud strategy.
Siemens Healthineers: Bringing Global Teams Together on Azure Hybrid Storage
Siemens Healthineers is a manufacturer of data-dependent medical devices with over 50,000 employees and partners around the world. When Siemens Healthineers adopted a cloud first strategy, they needed to migrate hundreds of TBs of data, including file shares, backup and disaster recovery data, DevOps workflows, and AI processing to Azure. The company turned to Cloud Volumes ONTAP to help them do that.
Using Cloud Volumes ONTAP, Siemens Healthineers was able to implement a successful hybrid cloud strategy with a number of benefits:
- Using Cloud Volumes ONTAP’s lift-and-shift approach and Cloud Sync, the Siemens Healthineers team was able to move 400 TB of data from on-prem systems to Azure without making any changes to the applications.
- By using Cloud Volumes ONTAP and Global File Cache, Siemens created a scalable cloud storage solution with on-prem performance, which allowed teams to cut down on time and costs when collaborating on the same datasets from disparate locations.
- Siemens freed up storage space by tiering “cold” data to lower-cost Azure Blob storage, saving 50% in storage costs.
- The move to a hybrid cloud solution has made it easier for Siemens’ global teams to collaborate on heavy workloads, such as its AI unit, which previously used a slower process that involved breaking up large datasets into smaller units to send across the globe.
Read more about how Siemens Healthineers uses a hybrid cloud strategy here.
Polygon Pictures: Collaborative Animation with Hybrid and Google Cloud Technology
Polygon Pictures creates 3D computer graphics (3DCG) animated works from television series to Hollywood blockbusters. While it’s headquartered in Tokyo, Polygon Pictures has teams around the world working on intensive animation production environments. Transitioning from entirely on-prem systems to the cloud was a necessity for creators at Polygon to easily access files and collaborate.
In order to gradually shift from on-prem storage, Polygon Pictures turned to Google Cloud for its advanced rendering services, as well as Cloud Volumes ONTAP to manage the data. Here’s what it achieved:
- Polygon Pictures was able to substantially reduce storage costs. Around 70% of the studio’s data is inactive and is now intelligently tiered from high-cost storage to low-cost Google Cloud object storage.
- Cloud Volumes ONTAP helped Polygon bypass the limited capabilities of on-prem storage for more robust data management with a hybrid cloud data fabric. By using SnapMirror®, the company can replicate data between on-prem and cloud systems.
- Using NetApp FlexCache, Polygon can leverage cloud bursting for optimizing file rendering jobs and distributing cache volumes geographically, offering faster access to branch offices.
- Cloud Volumes ONTAP was essential for the studio while teams were working remotely due to COVID-19. With a virtual production environment now in the cloud, Polygon employees could continue collaborating on projects and deliver them on schedule.
Continue reading about how Polygon Pictures adopted a hybrid cloud strategy.
Leading North American Energy Company Migrates On-Prem Isilon Data to a Hybrid Azure Environment
This multinational company runs the most expansive pipeline system in North America, transporting natural gas throughout the US and Canada. To take advantage of greater capabilities and more collaborative workflows, the company was searching for a way to migrate its on-prem data from Isilon to Azure, ultimately choosing Cloud Volumes ONTAP to help with the migration process.
By choosing Cloud Volumes ONTAP, the company was able to benefit in a number of ways:
- As the company shut down two on-prem data centers, it quickly migrated over 100 TB of data to Azure.
- With SnapMirror technology, the company was able to replicate cross-region and cross-zone datasets securely and cost-efficiently for DR and backup.
- Cloud Volumes ONTAP allowed the company to remain compliant with its existing information management policy using NetApp FPolicy.
- Cloud Volumes ONTAP’s storage efficiencies were available out of the box and proved to be superior to the Isilon system and native cloud storage.
British Pharmaceutical Company Moves from Scarce On-Prem Storage to Hybrid Cloud Solution with Azure
As a developer of a vast portfolio of medicines and vaccines, this pharmaceutical company is heavily reliant on data in order to test and develop new treatments. With an increased need for flexible storage for consistently growing data analytics, the company adopted a hybrid multicloud solution in order to continue using existing on-prem storage while migrating some data to Azure and Google Cloud.
By turning to Cloud Volumes ONTAP, this pharmaceutical company was able to accomplish a few different goals:
- With multiple types of workloads all with their own requirements, such as SAP data, analytics datasets, file shares that require consistent dual protocol CIFS/NFS access, the company relied on Cloud Volumes ONTAP for its high performance and availability and for its advanced data security and privacy capabilities.
- The company found Cloud Volumes ONTAP the best option for a true hybrid strategy, with the features it needed, including backups, encryption, and more coming straight out of the box.
- The company freed up on-prem AFF capacity by using NetApp Cloud Tiering to tier “cold” data to lower cost object storage in the cloud.
Major European Financial Institution Establishes a Unified Hybrid and Multicloud Data Platform with Azure and Google Cloud
Headquartered in Western Europe, this major financial institution handles banking and financial services for millions of corporate and private customers spread across multiple countries. As part of a transition to adopt a more digital strategy across the entire company, the financial institution looked for a solution that would allow it the flexibility to run the majority of its decentralized applications in the cloud for its DevOps and Kubernetes workloads.
Ultimately, it settled on a hybrid multicloud solution using Azure and Google Cloud. However, this shift presented a new challenge of managing multiple cloud providers. As a long-standing NetApp client, the company turned to Cloud Volumes ONTAP to help ease the transition and accomplish a number of goals:
- Using Cloud Manager, the company was able to create a central management point for its hybrid and multicloud storage operations.
- With ONTAP’s SnapMirror technology, data is able to seamlessly move between on-prem and cloud storage.
- As a financial institution, data security was of the utmost importance, and Cloud Volumes ONTAP allowed the company to retain its strict security guidelines both during and after the transition to a hybrid solution.
- As an existing NetApp client, the company was able to use Cloud Volumes ONTAP to move operations into a hybrid cloud environment without adding any third-party platforms that would require training and a learning curve.
Conclusion
More and more enterprises are shifting from on-prem solutions to hybrid or multicloud architectures, especially when teams are spread out globally and there’s a need for collaboration. However, these types of migrations take time, so having a solution that is agile enough to meet their needs throughout the migration process and that can be scaled to add new environments to the cloud is essential.
Not only does Cloud Volumes ONTAP make migration from on-prem storage a seamless experience, but it also provides the assurance growing companies need when it comes to managing ever-increasing quantities of data.