Whenever we speak with our customers, they tell us that data storage is a top concern. Data is the lifeblood of any organization, and many of them are in the habit of retaining all their data. As the volume continues to grow exponentially, organizations need to be confident their data is secure and easily accessible by applications and workloads. Doing this in complex hybrid multicloud environments is especially challenging.
With data volumes rapidly increasing, businesses require high-performance, scalable and cost-effective storage solutions to harness AI and other data-intensive technologies. As innovation accelerates, access to vast amounts of data is crucial to staying ahead.
Many businesses are adopting a cloud adjacent storage model to store data in close proximity to their cloud infrastructure and services. This model helps them enable agility and optimize costs while maintaining the control and security of their data storage.
During a recent webinar, we had a lively discussion about what’s driving businesses to integrate cloud adjacent storage into their digital infrastructure deployments and what they’re achieving quickly. Today, we’ll continue that discussion by sharing how the right design and data placement can help de-risk data storage, making it easier for companies to optimize their cloud workloads.
Businesses must balance different storage priorities
Every business has data storage requirements specific to their operating model. Making workload placement decisions that ensure proximity to data is foundational. Other standard priorities include maintaining security, compliance and control. Infrastructure reliability is non-negotiable; workloads, apps and data must be available continuously. Application performance is linked to data access speed, driving data placement decisions.
Further, we’ve entered the knowledge age. We’re not just sharing information anymore. Instead, we’re turning it into knowledge—something we can interact with and act on. This introduces new challenges:
- You need a massive amount of storage for volumes of data that must be located in proximity to clouds and users worldwide.
- Cloud sprawl, or the unmonitored expansion of cloud resources, can lead to inefficiencies if not properly managed.
- Global access to data introduces data sovereignty regulations and data residency requirements.
4 ways NetApp Storage on Equinix Metal helps de-risk data storage
Today, companies are actively searching for ways to make short-term decisions with long-lasting implications. De-risking data storage is high on their list of priorities, and deploying a cloud adjacent storage solution like NetApp Storage on Equinix Metal can help.
NetApp Storage on Equinix Metal pairs the control and efficiency of bare metal with high-performance storage and built-in encryption, making it an ideal solution for de-risking data storage. Here are four ways NetApp Storage on Equinix Metal can help businesses:
- Meet data sovereignty regulations. With compliance requirements evolving worldwide, you’ll likely encounter regulations wherever you transact business and store data. The combined observability capabilities available from both platforms can help you predict where your data will need to reside and make sure it stays there.
- Make the transition from CAPEX to OPEX. Retaining and maintaining depreciating assets for the long term is no longer cost-efficient. Eliminate time-consuming procurement cycles, upgrades and refreshes, or heavy financial commitments with NetApp Storage on Equinix Metal. Our flexible performance tiers enable you to choose the pace at which you grow compute and storage. Or position private all-flash storage arrays on demand for low-latency access to data.
- Secure data with a three-dimensional defense. You need more than one line of defense when it comes to protecting your data. NetApp provides the most secure data storage—by design, our products and services include industry-leading data protection and ransomware recovery capabilities for zero data loss, and we abide by data protection and privacy laws and regulations, such as the GDPR, PCI-DSS and CCPA. Then, layer on secure compute and interconnection from Equinix for a secure infrastructure stack.
- Storage infrastructure design. We apply our extensive expertise to solve your increasingly complex and interrelated application dependencies and introduce predictability that helps de-risk your data storage environments.
Earlier this year, Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) by TechTarget reported that customers reduced risk by positioning infrastructure in Equinix IBX® colocation data centers and using Equinix cloud adjacent storage technologies that can be flexibly deployed as a Service and powered by partners, including NetApp.[1]
Evolving the Equinix and NetApp partnership with innovation
The Equinix and NetApp partnership has evolved over several years as our two companies continuously collaborate on ways to serve our mutual customers. We’re excited about this latest development of our full-stack Storage as a Service solution that helps businesses simplify their storage operations.
With NetApp Storage on Equinix Metal, you get the same control and ease of management of an on-premises solution with the added flexibility and low latency required to quickly and securely move data to clouds or other locations. Flexible deployment options allow you to customize a cloud adjacent storage solution to meet your exact needs, no matter the size of your hybrid multicloud workloads or where you need to deploy them.
The Equinix data center footprint spans 70+ major markets on six continents, and we’re the global leader in low-latency cloud on-ramps. Equinix Fabric®, part of our portfolio of on-demand digital services, enables private, high-performance multicloud networking capabilities to help you get close to your cloud providers.
NetApp is the only vendor with native first-party data storage and management solutions embedded across all three major public clouds. This makes it easy to get the right data to the right place at the right time across your hybrid multicloud environment.
To learn how to solve the hybrid multicloud data problem, read the Cloud Adjacent Storage from Equinix Metal and NetApp e-book.
To learn more about how cloud adjacent storage helps de-risk data storage, watch the webinar.
[1] The Enterprise Strategy Group by TechTarget, Economic Validation: Analyzing the Economic Benefits of Equinix Cloud Adjacent Storage, February 2024.
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