To improve performance and capacity for its internal applications and netCare cloud service offering, neteffect technologies implemented FlexPod Datacenter with All Flash FAS. With the power of flash, neteffect transformed its business, improving its customer experience and expanding its service offerings to include best-in-class disaster recovery at an affordable price.
DELIVERING IT SOLUTIONS FOR THE BUSINESS
For more than 25 years, neteffect technologies has gotten ahead by standing out. The company sets itself apart from its competition by turning the traditional approach to managed services on its head.
“We don’t just sell products, we sell solutions,” explains John Campbell, chief technology officer of neteffect. “We start by understanding our customers’ business goals and creating custom solutions that blend on-premises IT and cloud services to help them meet those goals.”
FLEXPOD WITH AFF: A HYBRID APPROACH
As neteffect grew, it needed an IT solution that could scale both performance and capacity for its internal applications and its external netCare cloud offering. “We’d used many solutions in the past that were supposed to be dynamic and expandable, but we quickly reached their limitations, which threatened to affect our sales efforts,” Campbell says.
Campbell worked closely with NetApp and partner Tego Data Systems to implement a hybrid FlexPod solution that applies both AFF and FAS storage. FlexPod with AFF provides high performance for the company’s internal infrastructure and its netCare cloud service. FlexPod with FAS provides reliability for the company’s backup, archive, and disaster recovery services.
AN AGILE FOUNDATION FOR GROWTH
The FlexPod validated design and modular scalability give neteffect the agility to respond quickly to the demands of its internal users and cloud customers. Campbell’s team can easily scale performance and capacity independently by nondisruptively adding controllers and disk shelves as needed.
“We’re going to get a lot of longevity out of this platform,” says Campbell. “By combining NetApp storage with Cisco UCS servers, we can achieve enormous densities on our cloud platform. That means we can run more services on the same amount of hardware with a whole lot more performance.”
BETTER PERFORMANCE FOR NO ADDED COST
With FlexPod with AFF, internal applications now run up to 10 times faster than they did before, boosting productivity and efficiency. Maintenance windows have shrunk from hours to minutes, so it takes fewer resources to migrate virtual machines and spin up new systems. That fact translates to significant cost savings that neteffect can pass on to customers.
“Through FlexPod with AFF, we’ve been able to improve our customer experience,” Campbell states. “Unlike our competitors, we start you with flash and give you the option of moving less-demanding workloads down to tier 2 storage. The improved speed and efficiency of our infrastructure mean that we can give customers the extra performance of flash at no additional cost.”
EVOLVING THE BUSINESS WITH NEW OFFERINGS
With help from NetApp and Tego, neteffect discovered that it could expand its solution offerings to provide cost-effective disaster recovery (DR) services built on best-in-class technology. Rather than build and manage their own secondary DR sites, customers can now replicate data to neteffect’s archival storage tier. If there is an outage, they can be up and running on neteffect’s FlexPod based cloud offering in an instant. “Their users never have to know that there was a problem,” says Campbell. “It doesn’t get better than that.”
As an added benefit, customers with NetApp storage in their primary environments can use NetApp native replication tools to eliminate the need for expensive third-party replication software. This cost savings can be significant, making DR an affordable option for more of neteffect’s customers.
“NetApp and Tego have helped us think strategically about how we can use technology to transform our business and better meet the needs of our customers,” Campbell adds. “As the industry changes, that relationship will help us stay a step ahead.”