{"id":507138,"date":"2021-07-19T14:52:58","date_gmt":"2021-07-19T12:52:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=507138"},"modified":"2021-07-19T14:52:58","modified_gmt":"2021-07-19T12:52:58","slug":"as-digital-transformation-takes-off-storage-moves-to-the-cloud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/industry-news\/507138\/as-digital-transformation-takes-off-storage-moves-to-the-cloud\/","title":{"rendered":"As digital transformation takes off, storage moves to the cloud"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There can be no doubt that 2020 was the year in which digital transformation became mainstream, accelerating South African organisations\u2019 journey to the cloud.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhen it comes to cloud, Covid-19 had a massive impact,\u201d says Phil Bradley, NetApp Business Manager at CoCre8 Technology Solutions.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.cocre8.africa\/?utm_source=BusinessTech&amp;utm_medium=Article&amp;utm_term=June\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Click here for more information about CoCre8 Technology Solutions<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>\u201cThis is particularly true in South Africa where remote working has traditionally been discouraged, but now being enforced.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>And this has had a knock-on effect on the type of servers, storage and networking that organisations are investing in.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe move to remote working has led to organisations spending less on their own infrastructure and more on cloud services, be it Microsoft services or the development of new applications for remote work integration on other public cloud platforms,\u201d Bradley says.<\/p>\n<p>In the past, many enterprises were reluctant to move their data into the cloud because they couldn\u2019t be sure where it would end up being stored \u2013 but this concern has been addressed with the hyperscaler cloud providers now well-established in the local market.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe launch of Microsoft Azure\u2019s and AWS\u2019s data centres in South Africa has reduced the risk of data sovereignty problems for many South African organisations, allowing them to utilise cloud services with less potential consequence than before,\u201d Bradley explains.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBackup-as-a-service (BaaS) is also on the increase with a number of private cloud service providers offering varying levels of backup and disaster recovery services.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cMany South African organisations are also embracing the ability to utilise cloud[1]based, on-demand artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI\/ML) functions to quickly and seamlessly integrate these exciting new technologies into their customer and business offerings and functions,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"my-4\"><strong>Cloud challenges <\/strong><\/h3>\n<p>There are many compelling reasons to consider storage in the cloud, but Bradley points out that there are challenges too. \u201cThe most significant issue that organisations encounter when moving to public cloud is the expense,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cCloud resources are \u2013 by far \u2013 less expensive than on-premise infrastructure. However, it\u2019s a completely different infrastructure medium and the architecture of the client\u2019s environment has to take that into consideration. \u201c<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOne cannot simply lift and shift most on-premise workloads to the cloud using the legacy designs for compute, memory and storage allocations,\u201d he cautions.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThat\u2019s where many organisations get burnt.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Bradley explains that cloud architectures are use case-specific, and the allocation of compute, memory and storage needs to be elastic, switching systems on and off when required, scaling resources up or down as needed and even enabling the ability to switch the instances off, so customers don\u2019t have to pay when they aren\u2019t using the resource.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cCloud storage is also very different,\u201d Bradley adds. \u201cOrganisations have been caught out by unforeseen costs associated with ingress and egress of data and naturally the appropriate type of storage utilisation for any given application.\u201d<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"my-4\"><strong>The CoCre8 and NetApp solution<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p>NetApp helps to simplify and accelerate an organisation\u2019s cloud transformation by delivering unmatched control, protection, automation and efficiency for data workloads and applications running in the cloud, says Bradley.<\/p>\n<p>NetApp has also partnered with the world\u2019s largest public clouds, so its tightly integrated cloud service offerings make it easy to migrate and manage your workloads with ease.<\/p>\n<p>As a key NetApp partner in South Africa and Africa, CoCre8 is embarking on a \u201cNetAppreboot\u201d campaign, essentially focusing on South African market sectors where NetApp has traditionally not previously participated.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cCoCre8 is starting relevant conversations related to the \u2018new NetApp\u2019,\u201d Bradley says.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, NetApp itself is not a new company, he points out. The organisation has been delivering data management solutions for over 20 years, leading the market as a top storage vendor in a number of European countries as well as in APAC and the US.<\/p>\n<p>And NetApp ONTAP is the number one storage management software globally. Bradley says the new conversations aim to increase awareness of the range of solutions that NetApp offers, and to cement its position as the leading cloud data management solution provider.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOften, we enter into conversations with clients who remember NetApp as just a NAS device, and some who have a picture of NetApp as a unified storage system, capable of both SAN for block and NAS for file protocols.\u201c<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOften, people are not aware that NetApp is a truly Modern Unified Storage and data management solution.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>He describes Modern Unified Storage as the concept of having one platform for everything.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cA unified solution simultaneously supports mixed architectures, environments, infrastructure, workloads, protocols, data, and media.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>NetApp Reboot by CoCre8 is about cultivating a new mindset within its partner and customer communities.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis means increasing the market awareness of NetApp\u2019s storage management heritage and innovative ethos that has positioned them as a world leader in hybrid cloud data management solutions,\u201d according to Bradley.<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"my-4\"><strong>Leading in multi-cloud data management <\/strong><\/h3>\n<p>NetApp is no longer just an on-premise storage hardware provider, Bradley explains.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe company is leading the way globally in software-defined data management across multi-cloud. Whether it\u2019s on-premise, private, hybrid or public cloud, NetApp can ensure you reduce your wastage within the cloud and thereby your expenditure.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Two key NetApp solutions that address some of the challenges associated with cloud adoption are Spot by NetApp and Cloud Volumes ONTAP.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cNeither of these solutions require an overhaul of your on-premise infrastructure,\u201d says Bradley.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cInstead, they complement existing environments.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Spot by NetApp helps customers overcome nasty public cloud financial surprises, using AI\/ML to help organisations utilise Spot Instances.<\/p>\n<p>A Spot Instance is an unused compute instance that is available for less than the on-demand price in Azure, AWS and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).<\/p>\n<p>If customers are already using a Spot Instance, Spot will protect them against unexpected evictions common to these types of consumption models.<\/p>\n<p>Spot technology uses machine learning and analytics algorithms that enable users to utilise spot capacity for production and mission-critical workloads.<\/p>\n<p>This allows them to enjoy up to 90% cloud compute cost reduction with SLAs and SLOs that guarantee availability.<\/p>\n<p>Spot continuously scours the different capacity pools across operating systems, instance types, availability zones, regions, and cloud providers to make the most intelligent decisions in real-time regarding which instances to choose for provisioning and which ones to proactively rebalance and replace.<\/p>\n<p>For cloud operations agility, Spot uses application-driven provisioning to effortlessly and affordably scale any workload, from stateful single instances to cloud-native VM-based or Kubernetes clusters.<\/p>\n<p>Spot uses the ideal mix of cloud compute resources, from on-demand to reserved and spot instances, based on the dynamic needs of the application.<\/p>\n<p>In addition, Spot extends your Continuous Integration\/Continuous Deployment (CI\/ CD) pipeline of choice with Continuous Optimisation (CO) to complete the application delivery pipeline.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe technology has recently been adopted by a global virtualisation software company, a number of global electronic, telecommunication and third-party IT giants, among others.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAnd they have saved over $250-million across AWS, Azure and GCP directly off their bills.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Cloud Volumes ONTAP (CVO) leverages the NetApp ONTAP operating system in the cloud, bringing enterprise grade data management tools such as de-duplication, compression and compaction to reduce a customer\u2019s Cloud \u201cfootprint\u201d and drive down their cloud storage spend.<\/p>\n<p>CVO also adds benefits such as enterprise grade security, snapshot, replication and data management capabilities.<\/p>\n<p>Customers don\u2019t need to replace existing on-premise infrastructure since CVO is software-defined and therefore integrates with third-party arrays.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cTypically this means a reduction in your costs of somewhere between 40% and 50% of cloud compute and storage bills \u2013 and we have seen numbers as high as 70% for some organisations,\u201d Bradley says.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cMore importantly, it frees up resources to undertake core business functions and achieves these results in a standardised, repeatable way while mitigating risk and at the same time can also be centrally controlled and monitored.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The resilient architecture solves data loss and downtime problems before they occur, using cross-zone high-availability, cross-region DR replication, built-in backup to object storage, and instant restore from point-in-time snapshots.<\/p>\n<p>Overall, CVO creates unified storage to give customers a single great experience on any cloud.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There can be no doubt that 2020 was the year in which digital transformation became mainstream, accelerating South African organisations\u2019 journey to the cloud.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":57,"featured_media":507156,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10459],"tags":[15127],"class_list":["post-507138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-industry-news","tag-cocre8"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/507138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/57"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=507138"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/507138\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":507158,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/507138\/revisions\/507158"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/507156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=507138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=507138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=507138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}