Brought to you by:
Enterprise Strategy Group | Getting to the Bigger Truth™

ESG ECONOMIC VALIDATION

Analyzing the Economic Benefits of NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

By Tony Palmer, Principal Validation Analyst; and Eve Falk, Associate Validation Analyst
APRIL 2022

Executive Summary

While many organizations are turning to hybrid cloud strategies in order to alleviate some business challenges, these organizations are increasingly tasked with managing and securing data across distributed environments, as well as keeping the costs of operations minimized. NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP (CVO) was designed to streamline this management and security, while providing financial benefits to its users.

ESG validated the economic benefits that customers have realized since deploying NetApp CVO. Based on several case studies and an analysis of NetApp’s CVO calculators for three public clouds, ESG determined that organizations could save between 58-63% of monthly infrastructure costs for file storage and between 53-65% of monthly infrastructure costs for block storage when compared to the native cloud solution alone.

Introduction

This ESG Economic Validation focused on the quantitative and qualitative benefits organizations can expect from NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP (CVO). ESG reviewed how organizations can use CVO to simplify the management experience for distributed workloads, make data more highly available and protected, and keep costs manageable.

Challenges

It’s no secret that many organizations are adopting hybrid cloud strategies. ESG research revealed that almost half (48%) of surveyed organizations were currently using a hybrid cloud model, and another 27% were planning on adopting one in the next 12-24 months. Hybrid cloud models are known to provide flexibility and cost efficiency, and for many, offer a “best of both worlds” middle ground between going all in on public clouds or on-premises storage.

But, according to an ESG research survey, organizations supporting applications spanning public cloud infrastructure and on-premises data center infrastructure are still facing challenges such as ensuring and maintaining proper configuration of cloud services (30%), meeting and maintaining compliance with industry regulations across disparate cloud environments (24%), and the lack of consistent security policies across different application architectures (24%). The cost of public clouds can also pose a challenge for organizations, and more than one in four (27%) of ESG research respondents revealed cost and complexity of moving applications to the cloud as one of their biggest challenges with leveraging public cloud infrastructure services. There is a clear need for a secure hybrid cloud solution that can help organizations to easily manage their distributed applications, while minimizing costs.

Figure 1. Top Five Challenges with Distributed Applications

What are the biggest challenges or concerns your organization has with respect to supporting applications spanning public cloud infrastructure and on-premises data center infrastructure? (Percent of respondents, N=250, three responses accepted)

Source: ESG, a division of TechTarget, Inc.

The Solution: NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

With Cloud Volumes ONTAP (CVO), organizations can experience the same software-only storage appliance and data management software that they’re used to on-premises, in a public cloud environment. Built for file and block workloads and available natively on Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), NetApp CVO is designed to help organizations to minimize public cloud storage costs while improving performance, providing the ability to have real governance and compliance over one’s data. Organizations have the flexibility to run either traditional or cloud-native applications across the hybrid cloud environment without redesigning the code.

Key features include:

• Storage efficiencies such as built-in data deduplication, data compression, and thin provisioning, combined with efficient snapshots and cloning make storing data more streamlined for organizations, saving them time, money, and resources.

• Improved data availability with SnapMirror data replication across private and public clouds for disaster recovery, and Cloud Backup, which provides backup, restore, and long-term archive of cloud data.

• Data security in the form of in-flight and at-rest encryption and additional protection against viruses and ransomware that help to reduce risk to organizations by securing their most sensitive data.

• Tiering of data that saves money for organizations by moving cold data to more economical storage.

Figure 2. NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Source: ESG, a division of TechTarget, Inc.

ESG Economic Validation

ESG completed a quantitative economic analysis of NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP. ESG’s Economic Validation process is a proven method for understanding, validating, quantifying, and modeling the economic value propositions of a product or solution. The process leverages ESG’s core competencies in market and industry analysis, forward-looking research, and technical/economic validation. ESG evaluated several NetApp case studies to better understand and quantify how Cloud Volumes ONTAP has impacted organizations. ESG also validated an economic model developed by NetApp to compare the ongoing cost of infrastructure of native cloud storage to costs when leveraging Cloud Volumes ONTAP with those same cloud storage providers.

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP Economic Overview

• Lower TCO – By running applications on Cloud Volumes ONTAP, organizations can reduce their storage footprint and save operational costs.

• Improved Data Availability – By leveraging features like SnapMirror and Cloud Backup across multiple AWS availability zones (AZs), CVO gives organizations both high availability (HA) capabilities and more confidence in the case of failures.

• Reduced Complexity – By streamlining workload management processes, IT teams can more efficiently keep track of their workloads.

Cost Savings

ESG used storage requirements reported by NetApp clients to model how much organizations can save using NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP compared to native public cloud storage alone. With data reduction technologies like deduplication, data compression, thin provisioning, plus pointer-based snapshots and cloning built into the solution, organizations can minimize storage costs while maintaining performance, availability, and recovery objectives.

One customer case study addressed data tiering. By maintaining their metadata in SSDs, and all other data on lower-cost Azure blob object storage, the organization was able to optimize storage costs for production workloads. Another customer claimed that for every gigabyte of production data, they were able to retain 30 days of backups in just 2.5 gigabytes of storage.

“[We] uploaded 19 previously on-premises SQL databases to AWS with Cloud Volumes ONTAP in AWS. The consolidation reduced IT administration responsibility and operational cost."

– Director of Infrastructure Services and Technology Operations, International Airline

Improved Data Availability and Protection

Whether from cyber-attacks, hardware failures, human error, or natural disasters, downtime and data availability issues pose serious risks to operations. Organizations should implement technology solutions that they can trust to survive a failure. NetApp CVO is designed to be highly available and to seamlessly maintain operations when disaster strikes. Tiering capabilities also improve data agility and flexibiliity, as organizations can move data between high- and low-performance storage pools on demand without taking applications offline.

"NetApp Cloud Manager also provides a high-level web interface into NetApp controllers, both on premises and in the cloud, that is very simple, very easy." - CIO and IT Director, US Government Agency

CVO uses SnapMirror and Cloud Backup to protect data, ensure its availability, and enable HA deployments. SnapMirror replicates data across on-premises and public cloud storage, allowing organizations access to multiple copies of their data in multiple locations for disaster protection. For greater data protection, Cloud Backup holds long-term archives of organizations’ cloud data to ease the backup and restore processes in the case of an outage. CVO takes a data-centric approach to the zero trust model with a set of security capabilities that includes encryption, role-based access controls (RBAC), and privacy compliance controls. This helps CVO act as a segmentation gateway to help organizations better protect themselves against viruses, ransomware, and malicious acts.

Reduced Complexity

According to ESG research, almost half (46%) of organizations believe that IT is more complex than it was two years ago. Organizations are looking to reduce this complexity in an effort to streamline operations. With NetApp Cloud Manager’s Digital Wallet, organizations can manage their licenses from one location, as well as add and update licenses. CVO allows workloads to quickly “lift and shift” from on-premises environments into the cloud using familiar tools and techniques.

One government department moved 300TB of unstructured data into a colocation facility, which became their temporary backup site. Once in place, the data was replicated to the final location—Microsoft Azure—using SnapMirror. The CIO and Director of IT at the organization observed that synchronizing with SnapMirror, then disconnecting and terminating operations at the colocation facility, was fast and easy.

"I have worked in IT for 32 years, and I’ve done lots of storage migrations. This was the easiest storage migration that I’ve had. The transition was very simple, very seamless.”

– CIO and Director of IT , US Government Agency

ESG Analysis

ESG leveraged TCO calculators created by NetApp to build two modeled scenarios that compare the monthly infrastructure cost of three native public cloud storage providers and NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP. The same storage capacity, availability, and performance requirements were used in each scenario. The public cloud providers were configured as closely as possible to each other, with similar Instance/VM types and storage tiers.

Why This Matters

ESG research revealed that a majority (75%) of surveyed organizations are either currently using a hybrid cloud model or are planning on adopting one in the next 12-24 months. Organizations want to leverage the benefits of public cloud environments, while minimizing costs and risk. NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is designed to help organizations to reap the benefits of public clouds, while saving money. They do this by implementing storage efficiencies, tiering, data reduction, and other capabilities. CVO data management features both for block and file storage provide infrastructure cost savings of up to 65% compared to native cloud storage providers alone.

Block Storage

The first scenario, based on a NetApp CVO case study, modeled an organization looking for a cloud storage solution to support a 20 TB block storage solution for production databases. ESG ran multiple TCOs using NetApp’s CVO calculator to compare Native Azure LRS, AWS EBS, and Google Cloud Persistent Disk monthly costs with the same providers using CVO as part of their storage solution. ESG assumed that the organization used CVO data management software for its production workloads and file shares as well as for disaster recovery and backup copies. ESG used 50% NetApp storage efficiencies (the combination of deduplication and data compression for databases is expected to be slightly higher than with file systems). 90% of infrequently accessed data was tiered to lower-cost cloud provider storage, and only metadata was kept on premium high-performance SSD. ESG assumed that the organization needed 10% of their volumes cloned with SnapMirror for testing and upgrades and a 30-day retention value for daily backups. The results of the infrastructure TCO monthly savings are shown in Figure 4, and configuration details can be found in Table 1 in the Appendix.

Based on NetApp’s Cloud Volumes ONTAP TCO calculator, a 53%-65% reduction in monthly infrastructure costs for block storage can be expected when using any of the three cloud storage providers with CVO when compared to using any native cloud solution alone, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3. Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud with CVO Monthly Savings for Databases

Source: ESG, a division of TechTarget, Inc.

File Storage

The second scenario modeled the same organization with the same data capacity and availability requirements as in the first scenario, but in this case, the organization needed a 20TB shared file system to be used as an unstructured repository for production data. ESG ran multiple monthly TCOs using NetApp’s CVO calculator to compare Native Azure LRS, AWS EFS, and Google Cloud Persistent Disk monthly costs with the same providers using NetApp CVO. ESG assumed that the organization used CVO data management software for its production workloads and file shares as well as for disaster recovery and backup copies. ESG assumed 40% NetApp storage efficiency (the combination of deduplication and data compression). 90% of infrequently accessed data was tiered to lower-cost cloud provider storage, and only metadata was kept on premium high-performance SSD. ESG assumed that the organization needed 10% of their volumes cloned with SnapMirror for testing and upgrade and a 30-day retention value for daily backups. The results of the infrastructure TCO monthly savings are shown in Figure 4, and configuration details can be found in Table 1 in the Appendix.

Figure 4. Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud with CVO Monthly Savings for Unstructured Data

Source: ESG, a division of TechTarget, Inc.

Based on NetApp’s Cloud Volumes ONTAP TCO calculators, organizations could expect a 58%- 63% reduction in monthly infrastructure costs for file storage when using any of the three cloud storage providers with CVO compared to using any native cloud alone.

The Bigger Truth

Organizations are rapidly adopting distributed environments for their workloads and are customizing strategies to determine the optimal locations for the workload’s data. As these workloads disperse, and as IT becomes more complex, organizations are looking for simplified solutions that can help them to manage their data efficiently while keeping costs minimized.

ESG validated that NetApp CVO can bring benefits to customers in a number of scenarios:

File Services: Customers can take advantage of file-based services in the cloud today. However, with CVO, customers can take advantage of NetApp-embedded data management and data protection, which—with the exception of AWS FSx for NetApp ONTAP (FSxN)—are not natively offered in the public cloud, including storage efficiencies, integration with Active Directory, and secure access to data.

Disaster Recovery: Disaster recovery is an expensive proposition for most customers because it requires hardware, colocation, and physical locations. It requires ongoing CapEx that sits waiting for a day that they hope never occurs. Leveraging SnapMirror allows customers to replicate their data to CVO. Specifically, for NFS, SMB, and iSCSI workloads, customers can replicate data to CVO, and when the production facility is recovered, they can quickly replicate just the changed data back.

Production Applications: NetApp CVO enables organizations to quickly and easily ”lift and shift” production applications to the cloud, while leveraging CVO’s high availability and non-disruptive operations.

DevOps: Customers can make instant, space-efficient clones leveraging NetApp Snapshots, locally or on SnapMirror destinations, saving both storage costs and time spent waiting to copy data.

ESG validated that customers leveraging NetApp CVO can:

Reduce monthly infrastructure costs for file storage by 58-63% when compared to native cloud storage alone.
Reduce monthly infrastructure costs for block storage by 53-65% when compared to native cloud storage alone.
Improve data availability and protection, leveraging NetApp Snapshot, SnapMirror, and Cloud backup technologies for HA, within and across multiple AZs.
Simplify cloud storage deployment and management, leveraging NetApp Cloud Manager.

ESG’s analysis of the modeled scenarios proves savings for an organization with a specific set of requirements. No modeled scenario can predict savings that can be achieved for every set of requirements. For this reason, it is important that every organization performs its own TCO analysis on which to base purchasing decisions.

If your organization is looking to leverage cloud storage to minimize cost and complexity while increasing data availability and protection, ESG recommends that you give NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP serious consideration.

APPENDIX

Cloud Infrastructure Configuration for Production Workload & Disaster Recovery Scenario
Instance Type	Azure VM DS4_V2: 8 vCPUs 28GB Memory	AWS R5.2xl: 8 vCPUs 64GB Memory	Google Cloud N1-standard-8 8 vCPUs 30GB Memory
Tier to	Azure Blob	S3	Google Cloud Storage
Tier Type	Cool	IA (Infrequent Access)	Coldline
Disk Type	Azure Premium Page Blobs	Amazon EBS GP2	Google Cloud SSD PD
Storage Configuration for Production Workload & Disaster Recovery Scenario
Capacity		20TB
CVO Package		Essential
High Availability		On
Tiering Percentage		90%
Use Volume Clones		10%
Number of Retained Daily Snapshots		30
Daily Change Rate of the Primary Data		3%
Simulated Scenarios		NFS File System (File Storage) and Database (Block Storage)
Storage Efficiency		40% for File Systems 50% for Databases

LEARN MORE

DOWNLOAD PDF REPORT

This ESG Economic Validation was commissioned by NetApp and is distributed under license from TechTarget.

All product names, logos, brands, and trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Information contained in this publication has been obtained by sources TechTarget, Inc. considers to be reliable but is not warranted by TechTarget, Inc. This publication may contain opinions of TechTarget, Inc., which are subject to change. This publication may include forecasts, projections, and other predictive statements that represent TechTarget, Inc.’s assumptions and expectations in light of currently available information. These forecasts are based on industry trends and involve variables and uncertainties. Consequently, TechTarget, Inc. makes no warranty as to the accuracy of specific forecasts, projections or predictive statements contained herein.

This publication is copyrighted by TechTarget, Inc. Any reproduction or redistribution of this publication, in whole or in part, whether in hard-copy format, electronically, or otherwise to persons not authorized to receive it, without the express consent of TechTarget, Inc., is in violation of U.S. copyright law and will be subject to an action for civil damages and, if applicable, criminal prosecution. Should you have any questions, please contact Client Relations at cr@esg-global.com.

Enterprise Strategy Group | Getting to the Bigger Truth™

Enterprise Strategy Group is an IT analyst, research, validation, and strategy firm that provides market intelligence and actionable insight to the global IT community.