Xpanse Q1 2016 newsletter

Welcome

Welcome to the first issue of our new quarterly newsletter. As your trusted data management partner, we wanted to keep you informed about what’s happening in the world of enterprise data technology, and the great opportunities available to your in-house staff.

For more information about us, our solutions, news and more, visit our new website or follow us on LinkedIn.

Best wishes,
The Xpanse Team.

News

Xpanse becomes Australia’s only WA owned and Operated NetApp Star Partner

Last year, we attained Star Partnership status with our long-term enterprise storage management partner, NetApp. Our new status recognises our ongoing investment in and commitment to NetApp technologies and allows us to offer even better value and service to our customers.

Xpanse continues to grow their Brisbane presence

We are proud to announce our continued expansion to allow our customers easier access to our excellent service. Due to increasing demand in QLD, Xpanse will have a dedicated local account manager in Brisbane from March 2016, in addition to our excellent technical resources already on the ground. Initially, we will offer our broad range of IT services including Technology Solutions, Specialised Service Contracts, IP Surveillance, and Data Centre Infrastructure.

Cisco and NetApp Celebrate Five Years of FlexPod Customer Success

Today, more than 6,300 customers and 1,100 partners rely on the Cisco and NetApp FlexPod collaboration, just five years after the creation of this game-changing approach to data centre technology. Happy birthday, FlexPod. We can’t wait to see what’s in store for you next!

NetApp Acquires SteelStore

On 27 October 2015, NetApp announced their acquisition of Riverbed Technology’s SteelStore product line in an $80m all-cash transaction. The resulting technology, NetApp AltaVault, has since offered users even greater performance and capacity on a brand new hardware platform. More about AltaVault in Tech Talk.

Tech Talk

What is AltaVault? (formerly known as SteelStore)

NetApp AltaVault is an enterprise-class cloud-integrated storage appliance. Acquired from Riverbed, where it was sold under the SteelStore banner, by NetApp in October 2015, AltaVault is designed for securely and efficiently leveraging both public and private cloud in any backup and recovery strategy. It seamlessly integrates with existing backup software and compresses, deduplicates, encrypts and streams data to the cloud provider of your choice.

If you’re already a Riverbed SteelStore user, contact NetApp directly for help with migrating to AltaVault, or for ongoing support of SteelStore products. Visit NetApp Global Services Contacts to find the contact for your region.

Pure Storage now supports TLC 3D NAND flash

With new higher density flash drive support from Pure Storage, you can squeeze more capacity out of your existing flash modules. This, of course, will drive down the cost of solid-state storage, which is great news for all of us!

The higher density flash will be available early this year as an expansion shelf for Pure’s FlashArray//m Series arrays. The shelves hold 44TB and can be purchased fully populated or with 22TB of capacity. Assuming Pure’s average reduplication ratio of 5.2 to 1, this NAND can reduce the cost of flash to about $2.18/GB (based on USD/AUD exchange rates as at 19/01/2016).

Pure Storage has also expanded the features of Pure1, their cloud-based management offering, adding predictive support and capacity planning. Save on storage management resources for no additional cost. These new features are already available to Pure1 users, extending on the platform’s simplicity to enable existing resources to be utilised for more. For more information visit https://www.purestorage.com/company/news-and-events/press/technology_momentum_release.html

NetApp SnapProtect to be replaced by new NetApp/CommVault IntelliSnap collaboration

Many enterprise backup vendors offer solutions that take advantage of NetApp’s snapshot and low-bandwidth replication engines. This year, a new collaboration between NetApp and CommVault will see a brand new snapshot management product, CommVault IntelliSnap for NetApp. This product will replace NetApp SnapProtect as NetApp’s OEM snapshot solution.

NetApp SnapProtect’s end of availability is slated for 13th May 2016, with support to continue until 31st May 2019. NetApp and CommVault will provide an upgrade path for existing SnapProtect users to allow smooth migration to CommVault IntelliSnap for Netapp. Contact your Xpanse account manager or email sales@xpanse.com.au for more information.

Riverbed SteelHead Spot Check - FREE infrastructure review

In many environments, Riverbed SteelHead appliances are yielding significant ongoing benefits to customers, but the effectiveness of these benefits may erode over time and application performance improvements and WAN utilization reductions may be taken for granted. The SteelHead Spot Check is a sample-based process used to baseline the high-level solution performance, experience, and identify potential areas for improvement. This is not an in-depth assessment of solution health or infrastructure performance but allows for the current state of the installed SteelHeads to be quickly reviewed and identify if any applications are not being optimised by the existing configuration and version of RiOS.

Reasons for a SpotCheck

  • As applications change (Word, Excel, CAD, PACS), the protocols that support them change. This may mean that the existing SteelHeads may require reconfiguration to support the new protocols;
  • More applications are moving to encrypted protocols – again reconfiguration may be needed to support encrypted protocols;
  • Applications also potentially make servers and user workstations busier creating an increase in concurrent sessions which may create capacity issues in existing SteelHead deployments;
  • Cloud, hybrid enterprise, networking & SaaS potentially change where the applications “live” and traditional WAN optimisation may not be able to optimise to those new locations outside of the legacy customer data centre. Riverbed have solutions & configurations that can be adapted to support these environments;
  • Converged branch infrastructure (Zero Branch IT) enablement allows customers to potentially eliminate the need for distributed storage and servers as well as the costly backup processes that go with this.

If you are an existing Riverbed SteelHead user, or are interested in hearing more, please contact your Xpanse account manager or email sales@xpanse.com.au