Over the past few years, Alliant has seen our clients looking to minimize cost and complexity within their data centers by consolidating server platforms. The introduction of solutions from companies such as VMware and Citrix has presented significant benefits with the focus of reducing the number of servers deployed in a data center or desktops within client working environments. Our clients were able to reduce overall capital and operational expenditures while also allowing their business to scale quickly, giving them a competitive advantage over their competition.
Embracing this change in how our clients were looking at their data center, Alliant knew that if we were to compete in this space we needed to develop a practice that would not only be able to assist clients with this consolidation effort, but address the challenges presented with systems virtualization. One of these challenges is it drives the need for efficient and additional data storage. As we have seen over the past two years, data will continue to grow without consideration of the state of the economy and clients will still have to invest in storage capacity, unlike other “nice to have” technologies. This drove us to begin our evaluation of storage partners that would allow our clients to continue meeting their goals of lowering overall costs and driving efficiency into the data center.
Many of our competitors in the marketplace have an extensive list of partners that often overlap in many technologies. At Alliant, we focus on a few core partners that augment each other’s technology - which allows us to be true subject matter experts not only around the technology, but as well our partners' solutions. Due to this reason, we put in place a fairly extensive and detailed evaluation process of potential partners. We look at their technology strengths/weaknesses, financial strength, strategic partnerships, and relevance to the marketplace. After looking at all the key players in the storage space, NetApp stood out in all areas and demonstrated the ability to meet our clients goals with a virtualized infrastructure.
NetApp addresses many of the challenges/goals our clients have faced.
- Consolidation/Management: NetApp is the only platform in the marketplace that offers unified platform for all protocols: CIFS/NFS/iSCSI/FC. Clients are now able to remove file servers, NAS boxes, multiple SANs and have a single array to support all their needs, ultimately removing complexity and reducing both CapEx and OpEx costs.
- Virtualization: NetApp has the ability to leverage a customer's entire disk pool with solutions like thin provisioning and add/change/delete storage on demand to meet the changing needs of the business. Disk sizes are increasing and prices are declining, so the longer you can wait to invest in more capacity the more money your organization will save.
- Storage Efficiency: Maximize your investment by gaining upwards of 95% disk savings in your VM environment with data dedupe on your primary storage. Utilize a number of other NetApp features that offer additional savings over the competition based on their patented SnapShot technologies.
- Data Integrity: NetApp offers a number of application aware technologies that help ensure consistent, efficient backups and equally important instant restores. Applications supported include Oracle, SQL, Exchange, SAP, Sharepoint, and HyperV.
- Alliances: NetApp has formed relationships with many application and infrastructure companies. The relationship we feel is truly changing the data center landscape is that of NetApp, VMware and Cisco. Virtualization is now extended across all layers of the data center (systems, network and storage) to create one unified architecture. End results include ease of overall management and the recurring theme of savings in both CapEx and OpEx dollars.
At Alliant, we have the utmost confidence that when a client engages us to assist in a data center move, refresh or new build, we have the right partnerships in place and services developed to ensure mutual success.
-Derek Young, Alliant Account Manager, New England
