Intelligent Data Centres Issue 03 | Page 15

LATEST INTELLIGENCE PRESENTED BY ENTERPRISE STORAGE: THE FOUNDATION FOR APPLICATION AND DATA AVAILABILITY IDC Opinion With most enterprises undergoing digital transformation (DX), the information technology (IT) infrastructure is becoming a key strategic asset that drives not only the business but also competitive differentiation. While not all workloads are considered mission critical, all enterprises have a group of applications they do consider mission critical, and many work with service-level agreements (SLAs) that require “five-nines” (99.999%) or better availability for those workloads. Because higher levels of availability tend to drive higher costs for factors such as redundancy and/or resource utilization, storage systems today need to be configurable to meet this level of availability for only those applications that need it. www.intelligentdatacentres.com High-availability technology is well understood, and in this white paper, IDC discusses a number of availability features that form the “defense in depth” strategy, which is most cost effective for customers looking to modernize their IT infrastructure. Customers should use this as a checklist when evaluating new storage purchases that must deliver the performance, availability, and flexibility demanded by today’s evolving datacenter workloads. With its ONTAP 9–based enterprise storage solutions, NetApp measures up very well against this checklist. Over the past four and a half years, NetApp’s installed base of tens of thousands of enterprise storage systems has proven that it can meet “six-nines” availability requirements (based on IDC’s in-depth review of uptime statistics collected by NetApp’s cloud-based predictive analytics platform). ◊ Issue 03 15