Lee Caswell, VP of Products, Services & Solutions Marketing at NetApp and John Woodall, VP of Engineering at Integrated Archive Systems, sat down for a candid conversation on the partnership between the two businesses and how vastly different customers’ data management needs are today than from a year ago. They noted that a year ago, customers would ask about flash’s capabilities to deliver speed and agility, but were concerned with cost. Now, Woodall says that customers are more interested in talking about how they can transition to the cloud if they haven’t already, and are looking for the right suite of technologies to support their transition – with flash being a large part of that conversation.
Because flash technology provides greater scalability, speed, and agility while consuming fewer data center resources than spinning disk, it is the technology of choice for many customers transitioning to the cloud. Woodall says that customers are also interested in the orchestration, automation and simplicity of flash. Because the technology has changed so rapidly, there are benefits and business outcomes that are now being noticed that weren’t necessarily seen before. For example, flash operates at lower power consumption, providing a huge cost savings for agencies. By reducing the amount of space that is utilized and maintained with traditional data centers, agencies are seeing cost savings across the board; even enabling some to consolidate their data centers.
NetApp also differentiates itself from other storage solutions providers because it has one of the few disk space architectures that lends itself to be retrofitted correctly to include flash and has a true portfolio of flash products to support a variety of data management needs. In addition, NetApp’s flash technology is nondisruptive, which is a key component to maintaining the right level of IT infrastructure that the public sector needs to support the mission. In addition, Woodall mentions that NetApp has a 20 year history of engineering, application support, and a solid proven platform, which sets them apart from other storage solutions providers. The company has proven that they can innovate and scale in a challenging environment where the pace of change has never been faster and as such, has paved the road to further innovate for the future.
Check out the conversation between Caswell and Woodall here.
