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Officeworks, a major Australian-based office supplies retailer, first started using the cloud a few years ago. At first, the enterprise—which currently employs over 7000 team members and manages more than 160 retail stores—moved some of its workloads to AWS, while maintaining on-premises data centers that operated its legacy applications. The company has since expanded significantly, and its engineers have begun to take steps towards refreshing Officeworks’ outdated systems and reforming the company’s cloud strategy. This reform started taking shape in 2016, when Officeworks began to subscribe to NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP.
Before we dig deeper into the particulars, let’s take a closer look at what Cloud Volumes ONTAP is all about.
What is Cloud Volumes ONTAP?
It’s clear why Officeworks chose Cloud Volumes ONTAP. This multi-cloud storage management solution offers a wide array of storage capabilities delivered seamlessly across on-premises data centers and public cloud resources on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. Cloud Volumes ONTAP offers its customers a comprehensive portfolio of solutions, including high availability, data protection, storage efficiency, and multiprotocol file share services.
This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what Cloud Volumes ONTAP can do to reform the way businesses engage with the cloud. Check out the article below to learn how Cloud Volumes ONTAP made it possible for Officeworks to make their cloud-first strategy a reality.
Read the full Officeworks story here.
What Did Officeworks Gain by Using Cloud Volumes ONTAP?
With Cloud Volumes ONTAP, Officeworks was able to break away from the constraints of its legacy environment and efficiently utilize AWS resources. Let’s take a look at some concrete examples.
Data tiering: Cloud Volumes ONTAP’s data tiering feature automatically transfers cold, i.e. infrequently used data, to lower-cost Amazon S3 storage. Conversely, as it becomes hot, that data is automatically moved back to the Amazon EBS performance tier when needed. As a result, Officeworks enjoys lower total cost of operation and more efficient use of its storage resources—with high-performance disks for frequently used data, and a lower-cost capacity tier for the large amounts of cold data they need to store.
Moving DR and dev/test resources to the cloud: With Cloud Volumes ONTAP, Officeworks is no longer subject to the limitations of physical data centers. Rather than purchase and maintain SATA arrays for its DR data, Officeworks has moved its DR data and dev/test functions to Cloud Volumes ONTAP as well. Since the DR and dev/test data are mostly cold, Officeworks is tiering them to lower-cost Amazon S3 object storage. Should the DR data be needed in a recovery operation, it can seamlessly and automatically be brought back up to the performance tier. And the dev/test data can be cloned and sent to wherever needed. What’s more, data can be accessible through NFS, SMB, or CIFS using Cloud Volumes ONTAP file sharing features.
Moving away from on-premises: Officeworks is gradually freeing itself from its outdated legacy environment. It is treating Cloud Volumes ONTAP as a “springboard” from which on-premises data can be easily lifted into AWS. Once data is in the cloud, NetApp’s replication capabilities allow Officeworks to easily clone data and transfer it anywhere and everywhere within their AWS environment.
