Netapp bets big on thin provision, scalability and deduplication

Global leader in storage, Netapp, bets big on various factors like thin provision, scalability, deduplication and compression through the latest storage solution.

"We have today announced a new version of its flagship storage operating system - clustered Data ONTAP. The new software gives organizations and cloud service providers the capability to rapidly and cost effectively deliver new services and capacity with maximum application uptime. Clustered Data ONTAP 8.2 cuts through the performance, availability, and efficiency limits of traditional hardware silos, empowering IT to nondisruptively align the storage infrastructure with changing business and application demands.", said Krithiwas Neelakantan, Director, Channels and Alliances, Netapp India.

The storage vendor that is having 110 partners across the country (including Global system integrators, Reginal system integrators and cloud service providers and VARs), is likely to bring more customer-specific activities through the channel partners. Asked about the segregation of the channel, he said that, both in terms of channel and customer, the company does not discriminate on the name of tiers. "One customer may be an SMB. However, it does not mean that he/she gets least importance. In his/her terms, the data which is there may be very critical and may be the livelihood and may face huge loss without that. We give equal considerations for the customers regardless of their size and profits", he said. 

On the channel activities, he said that Netapp is always focused on investing on the partners. "In all the cases, it is the vendors who bring leads for the partners. However, in our case, we have satisfied set of partners who are bringing the entire deployment ecosystem for their customers right from pre-sales till services", said Krithiwas who further added that Netapp has most exhaustive, comprehensive training and enablement programmes. "Right from Selling, sales consulting, architect, implementing, post-sales support, we think that partners have to be skilled to address our customer requirements."

He also said that they do not advise partners to just sell the storage, but provide solutions for their customers. "In fact, we often suggest our customers to go for less storage. With thin provision, scalability, deduplication and compression, we think that the customer needs can be satisfied even in future if they want to expand their business" , he said concluding that at any point of time, the performance of Netapp storage will never compromise even after using the data in primary storage.