As legacy infrastructure around the globe struggles under the ever-growing end-user demand of data generation and consumption, the industry steadily moves towards cloud to relieve the pressure.
Hybrid at the Expense of Your Resources
However, with more and more companies migrating to cloud-based architecture, hybrid cloud solutions are in much higher demand. This is because companies aren’t moving everything to cloud during their migrations (some key elements still make more sense on-premise). Unfortunately, as companies move these selective components of their infrastructure to cloud platforms, they often do so at the expense of increased data fragmentation.
“Fragmenting your data [and resources] while you deploy a hybrid cloud architecture is fatal to your digital transformation objectives. It simply moves your company backward rather than forward,” warns George Kurian, CEO and President at NetApp.
The purpose of a cloud migration is to accelerate business success, not complicate it—companies needed a way to prevent resource fragmentation and remain in control of their hybridized environments. To solve this, NetApp built OnCommand Insight.
A More Strategic Digital Transformation
Built for Clarity and Strategic Momentum
OnCommand Insight, or OCI, is a hybrid-specific Storage Resource Management tool that monitors, controls, analyzes, and automates all of your on-premise and cloud-based storage infrastructure. With OCI, you can seamlessly manage storage as an end-to-end service and integrate it into your entire IT service-delivery chain. No more fragmentation—OCI makes it possible to treat your multi-cloud, hybrid, and multi-location environments as a single entity.
OCI installation is simple and non-invasive to your workflow as it requires no agents. Flexible to your unique needs as a company, NetApp OCI supports heterogeneous environments with third-party integrations and multi-vendor storage support (including NetApp and other major storage vendors like EMC, HDS, HPE, and IBM). Once installed, OCI automatically searches for and discovers installed storage and SAN devices on your networks and begins gathering detailed performance metrics to give you full visibility of all infrastructure. By identifying misused, underutilized, or orphaned assets across hybrid environments, OCI gives you the actionable insights you need to:
- Optimize existing resources
- Accurately plan future purchases (no over or under-provisioning)
- Mitigate overspending
- Resolve performance issues more quickly
- Manage risks, minimize downtime, and accelerate cloud deployment
More Than a Network Band-Aid
It is important to note that NetApp OCI is not a one-and-done diagnosis and treatment plan for your hybrid environments. Rather, OCI is made to integrate with your storage networks and become a long-term, intelligent automation tool to sustain healthy storage and resource management company-wide.
Once you have established a healthy steady-state (with the insights provided through OCI analytics), OCI allows you to define policies and establish best practices for redundancy, sharing, and utilization.
Moreover, OCI has built-in diagnostic and planning tools that allow you to run simulations on any changes you plan to make. OCI will automatically check for policy violations that could lead to poor service quality or downtime so that the issues can be solved before the changes are implemented—preventing expensive rollbacks.
Multi-Faceted Benefits
The benefits of OCI go well beyond the actionable insights you are given and its intelligent automation features—consider how this tool directly relieves the burden on your IT teams and improves customer satisfaction. OCI automatically troubleshoots your environments and discovers IT failures in real-time, allowing your team to mitigate small incongruencies before they become larger issues. Moreover, as you launch new hybrid initiatives, your team can move forward with informed confidence that their instances will perform efficiently and resiliently in the new hybrid environment.
In short, OCI delivers speed, accuracy, and efficiency—ultimately giving your company the tools you need to simplify and optimize your current hybrid environments. From there, OCI frees up cloud spend, streamlines protocols, and gives you the intelligent insight you need to strategically move forward with more ambitious cloud initiatives.
NetApp Trailblazes to Stay Ahead of Your Needs
NetApp has firmly established themselves as one of the most proactive hybrid data services companies in the industry. And, like TSA, they accomplish this by listening.
NetApp recognizes what hybrid cloud customers are facing because they take the time to listen to, research for, and design against client pain points, limitations, and future goals—and this isn’t some cheap strategy to sell more expensive solutions. Instead of simply reacting to industry needs, NetApp gets out in front and designs ahead of those challenges before customers even have to experience them.
They are pioneers for the sake of their clients.
What this means is that NetApp will continue to update and hone their solutions to meet the challenges you will face as a modern business, and OCI specifically will grow with and trailblaze ahead of your hybrid IT initiatives.
Take the risk out of your complex technology migrations.
Contact TSA to see how OnCommand Insight can create an intuitive, intelligent data management platform for your hybrid cloud initiatives.