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Azure NetApp Files—Now With a 99.99% Uptime Guarantee

Saying downtime is expensive is an understatement.

  • 14-hour outage cost Facebook approximately $90 million (occurred in March 2019)
  • 12-hour Apple store outage cost the company $25 million (occurred in March 2015)
  • 7 days of downtime cost aluminum manufacturer Norsk Hydro more than $40 million (occurred in March 2019)

Those figures are just a few examples of industry heavy-hitters with wide operating margins and money in the bank. It hurts, but they can handle a hit. The true cost of downtime factors in business disruption, revenue loss, and end-user productivity. Conservative estimates for enterprise downtime place losses at about $100,000 per hour.

Downtime Doesn't Just Hurt the Bottom Line

Downtime hurts the bottom line. It can also hurt brand reputation, affect customer trust and product velocity, deplete internal productivity, and lead to employee burnout. Outages are stressful. As a Forbes article pointed out, “No engineer wants to be woken up at 3 a.m. and thrust into a stressful incident, where resolution is critical and time is of the essence. If these scenarios play out consistently, week in and week out, people will get frustrated and look for an exit. The next thing you know, you’re short-staffed and falling even further behind.”

Not to be a harbinger of doom, but depending on what particular resources go down, the consequences can be dire. Not being able to post your gourmet dinner to Instagram or Facebook is one thing; not being able to contact 911 emergency services is quite another. This frightening possibility became reality in 2019, when a cloud communications network experienced a nationwide outage that impeded emergency services.

More Data is Bound for the Cloud

More enterprise-level customers are moving core business applications to the cloud. And when core business applications go bad, it has a negative effect on everything—user experience, user or consumer access, the web environment’s functionality, sales and inventory. In a supply chain, if the database goes down, then orders stall, which means lost revenue and customers turning to other vendors. The financial and operational repercussions of system disruption are extensive.

Availability of company resources is extremely important in those environments. Companies will spend a lot of time building out their application infrastructure to make sure those resources always operate.

Many customers deploying their core applications in the cloud are planning for 99.95% uptime for their overall environment. If they use any resource that has a lower uptime guarantee, they could suffer a hit to their overall application availability.

When an organization can get a compute environment or a storage environment that has guaranteed availability or service level agreements (SLAs), it ensures peace of mind and decreases risk to their business.

You Had Me at 99.99% Uptime Guarantee

Until recently, Azure NetApp Files had a three 9 uptime guarantee (99.9%). Last month, durability increased by 10x to 99.99%.

To the benefit of Azure customers, Microsoft puts their money where their cloud is. Microsoft says Azure uptime is supported with an SLA, and if they don't meet their SLAs, they're financially obligated to remunerate the customer—in some cases as high as 25%. Microsoft is building the highest levels of redundancy into their Azure architecture.

Customers can use Azure NetApp Files right out-of-the-box and exceed their 99.95% uptime goals. They don't have to build in additional availability environments, invest in cloud infrastructure upgrades, or make replicas and secondary operational environments to meet both their higher availability requirements and their uptime goals. Customers can use the service as is, with four 9s of availability. Azure NetApp Files is making life easier for customers by substantially lowering the business risk associated with downtime, enabling them to meet their application environment objectives—all with a single service.

Azure NetApp Files is a pioneering service offered by Microsoft that's built directly into the Azure cloud. Azure NetApp Files solves availability and performance challenges for enterprises that want to move mission-critical applications to the cloud, including workloads like:

  • HPC: High-performance computing at higher speeds than on-premises environments
  • SAP: Certified for SAP as well as HIPAA
  • Linux: NFS and SMB file shares need zero code modifications to move to the cloud
  • WVD: Window Virtual Desktop delivers a highly available, seamless user experience across any device
  • Oracle and SQL Server workloads: Accessibility without latency

Experience 99.99%

Register for Azure NetApp Files. It’s flexible, scalable, secure, and ridiculously fast. And now, with a 99.99% uptime guarantee, you won’t lose sleep over what downtime could do to your business. Not ready to register? See it in action yourself with a 1-on-1 demonstration.

Cloud Data Services

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