Pironet NDH is now offering its customers from small and medium-sized companies the opportunity to operate their local storage infrastructure interruption-free and to tailor it to the requirements of a Private Cloud environment. In order to do this, the IT service provider is supporting the new "Clustered Ontap" technology from the storage provider NetApp in its solutions for local datacenters. Pironet NDH presented the storage systems for the first time together with other solutions at its Customer Day in Cologne.
"Small and medium-sized companies are enormously interested in enterprise storage. Nowadays small and medium-sized companies make similar demands on the datacenter infrastructure as major enterprises did years ago, for example with respect to the topic 'Always-on'," says Managing Director Katharina Gülpen as she sums up the first Customer Day of Pironet NDH Enterprise Solutions. Around 30 companies gathered information on new technologies for small and medium-sized enterprises at Cologne's Sport & Olympia Museum in early November.
Technical breakthrough in storage for shared environments
Company executives and heads of IT paid particular attention to a demonstration of the new Clustered Ontap technology from NetApp, which enables companies to virtualise storage networks in their datacenters. "Previously, storage systems, especially in shared environments, were subject to limitations, for example with respect to scaling or downtimes resulting from planned maintenance windows," explains Ms Gülpen. "However, thanks to the new version of the storage operating system from NetApp, Always-on datacenters will become affordable for small and medium-sized enterprises."
"In addition, this technology allows almost any number of physical storages to be scaled to a single virtual storage. This makes it considerably simpler and cheaper for companies to adjust their storage resources flexibly to the current requirements," adds Ms Gülpen.
Pironet NDH customers can with immediate effect prepare both their existing and new storage systems for the new storage technology. "In particular when customers are setting up new systems, we recommend that they should already configure the infrastructure for Clustered Ontap from NetApp. This is definitely the future in the storage sector; this approach consequently also means greater investment security for companies," stresses Ms Gülpen.
Tested modular architectures for Private Clouds
In addition to Clustered Ontap, Pironet NDH now also supports the use of tested reference architectures for Private Clouds in its datacenter and storage solutions. For instance, at the Customer Day the datacenter specialists presented the "ExpressPod". This is the name of a preconfigured datacenter construction set for virtualisation, servers, storage and network which NetApp offers in conjunction with Cisco and VMware.
Each construction unit of the ExpressPod supplies up to 500 users with application services, computing power and storage space and can be expanded using further units. Experts of Pironet NDH Enterprise Solutions integrate the systems in the customer's datacenter and, when requested, also operate these remotely.
"Such complete solutions really make sense, above all for small and medium-sized companies, as the cooperating vendors have tested how the various components interwork and also offer a comprehensive service. This means establishing an in-house Private Cloud is significantly easier and involves less complexity," says Ms Gülpen.
"Small and medium-sized companies are enormously interested in enterprise storage. Nowadays small and medium-sized companies make similar demands on the datacenter infrastructure as major enterprises did years ago, for example with respect to the topic 'Always-on'," says Managing Director Katharina Gülpen as she sums up the first Customer Day of Pironet NDH Enterprise Solutions. Around 30 companies gathered information on new technologies for small and medium-sized enterprises at Cologne's Sport & Olympia Museum in early November.
Technical breakthrough in storage for shared environments
Company executives and heads of IT paid particular attention to a demonstration of the new Clustered Ontap technology from NetApp, which enables companies to virtualise storage networks in their datacenters. "Previously, storage systems, especially in shared environments, were subject to limitations, for example with respect to scaling or downtimes resulting from planned maintenance windows," explains Ms Gülpen. "However, thanks to the new version of the storage operating system from NetApp, Always-on datacenters will become affordable for small and medium-sized enterprises."
"In addition, this technology allows almost any number of physical storages to be scaled to a single virtual storage. This makes it considerably simpler and cheaper for companies to adjust their storage resources flexibly to the current requirements," adds Ms Gülpen.
Pironet NDH customers can with immediate effect prepare both their existing and new storage systems for the new storage technology. "In particular when customers are setting up new systems, we recommend that they should already configure the infrastructure for Clustered Ontap from NetApp. This is definitely the future in the storage sector; this approach consequently also means greater investment security for companies," stresses Ms Gülpen.
Tested modular architectures for Private Clouds
In addition to Clustered Ontap, Pironet NDH now also supports the use of tested reference architectures for Private Clouds in its datacenter and storage solutions. For instance, at the Customer Day the datacenter specialists presented the "ExpressPod". This is the name of a preconfigured datacenter construction set for virtualisation, servers, storage and network which NetApp offers in conjunction with Cisco and VMware.
Each construction unit of the ExpressPod supplies up to 500 users with application services, computing power and storage space and can be expanded using further units. Experts of Pironet NDH Enterprise Solutions integrate the systems in the customer's datacenter and, when requested, also operate these remotely.
"Such complete solutions really make sense, above all for small and medium-sized companies, as the cooperating vendors have tested how the various components interwork and also offer a comprehensive service. This means establishing an in-house Private Cloud is significantly easier and involves less complexity," says Ms Gülpen.
