I am very excited about Spot by NetApp. It brings a whole new partner and customer landscape to our brands in Southern Africa and the territories throughout the rest of Africa where CoCre8 transact with our reseller partner base.
By Phil Bradley, NetApp Business Unit Manager at CoCre8 Technology Solutions
Spot was acquired by NetApp in early 2020 after NetApp embarked on a cloud optimisation journey, with the goal of cutting cloud spend, freeing up operational resources and minimising application disruptions.
When I engage with partners and customers, I refer to the “traditional NetApp”, where the systems are on-premise, multi-protocol, multi-drive type and an efficient enterprise storage platform. The NetApp ONTAP operating system resides on the entry level to the high-end FAS and all-flash arrays. NetApp has all the storage efficiencies that one would expect from an enterprise data management platform; deduplication, compression, compaction, snapshots, automated data tiering, etc.
The “new” NetApp dates back to about six years ago, when NetApp embarked on a journey that would keep the company relevant in the public cloud era. All the services, functionality and operational efficiencies that NetApp offered their clients on-premises, was made available in the cloud.
The best of on-premise is now available in the cloud. In fact, NetApp ONTAP stretches your storage optimisation globally, no matter the media the data is stored on. Moving between on-premise, private and public cloud is as easy as a “drag and drop”.
Spot by NetApp does for compute, what NetApp ONTAP does for storage: Spot optimises cloud spend by using the right virtual compute resource at the right time for the least amount of money while maintaining SLAs and system availability. Spot is a cloud and resource optimisation software-as-a-service (SaaS), available in AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform.
Challenges in the public cloud
The public cloud is great, but it’s often more expensive than the IT data centre. This is especially true when one has an on-premise mindset when designing and deploying applications and services in the public cloud.
If one had to jot down a list of the pros and cons of public cloud, most would agree that cloud is great for deploying and developing business applications without the frustrations of hardware constraints due to budget and system availability. Development teams are able to service business applications with on demand SaaS and, of course, the holy grail is to cut costs and downsize your data centre and disaster recovery sites.
But the challenge is that the public cloud infrastructure is often more expensive than a capitalised data centre infrastructure. Traditional IT budgets for compute, networking and storage are optimised for data centres – and don’t forget that most people like to kick the tyres and see what they have spent their hard-earned cash on.
Public cloud has three consumption models which have a direct impact on costs:
- On-demand, which is the most flexible, allowing you to scale up, down or off as and when resources are required. This is the most expensive model but allows for by-the-second compute capacity with no long-term commitments.
- Reserved capacity, which is more affordable and is available as a one- or three-year commitment plan with significant discounts. However, it is less flexible.
- Lastly, there is the excess capacity or spot instances model. This is a cost saving option which allows one to run a virtual machine on unused capacity within the hyperscaler infrastructure. These prices are not fixed and fluctuate as the availability of machine types and instances become available. However, there is a risk in the spot market. The cloud providers can terminate your service with a two-minute notification. We have seen instances where only a 30-second warning was given. That’s a lot of risk, and your ability to react to that in a small window, takes a lot of planning and automation.
Interruptions are something you have to live with, and production applications are not interested in any interruptions to their compute services when they’re trying to run 24/7 business applications.
Enter Spot by NetApp
This is where Spot by NetApp comes in, helping organisations to solve these barriers for entry into the public cloud.
Spot technology uses machine learning and analytics to effortlessly and affordably, scale any workload, from stateful single instances to cloud-native clusters, using the ideal mix of cloud compute resources, from on-demand to reserved and spot instances.
Spot by NetApp’s approach is to use data analytics and automation to deliver reliable, scalable cloud infrastructure at the lowest possible cost. Spot offers tremendous cost savings, with an average of roughly 60% off compute costs.
Spot currently manages over 5-billion compute hours per month and currently has over 500 000 concurrent nodes under management in over 60 countries. This base allows the AI and built-in automation engines to predict when a spot instance is going to go down and then replaces that instance before the instance goes down.
Spot has features that displays a richer view of what jobs are running on and where they are running. Spot allows you to use different instance types that your organisation wouldn’t typically use whilst still giving you better performance and more compute instance for our money.
What does this mean for your cloud operations team? Not only does Spot stabilise the infrastructure and free up resources, but it is able to decrease costs by giving the agility back to cloud ops teams who are responsible for building infrastructure, shipping applications to production, managing costs, optimising resources, securing applications and infrastructure.
The ideal candidates for Spot are organisations with an annual cloud compute spend of $800 000. Spot operates on a pay-as-you-save model, charges are based on monthly consumption savings. The beauty is, if you don’t save, there are no costs.
For more information, or to give Spot by NetApp a trial, contact Phil Bradley at phil.bradley@cocre8.com
CoCre8 wins in the data centre with smart solutions, strong partnerships
The data centre is still the heart of any enterprise, and a modern data centre is key to an organisation’s digital transformation efforts.
But the resource-intensive data centre is a thing of the past: today CIOs want a solution-based infrastructure that is easy to deploy and manage.
The Fujitsu family of data centre solutions fits the bill.
PRIMERGY servers
FUJITSU Server PRIMERGY systems deliver workload-optimised x86 industry standard servers for any workload and business demand.
Since there is no single server solution to meet all these needs, Fujitsu offers a broad server portfolio consisting of expandable tower servers, versatile rack-mount servers, density-optimised multi-node servers as well as GPU servers purpose-built for the demands of AI and VDI.
While all these systems are designed to handle multiple workloads, each server is optimised for specific use cases. Whatever the size of your business – large enterprise with multiple sites, or a small or medium-sized company with limited space and budget – with the right choice of server, your IT can become the business enabler you have always wanted it to be.
Fujitsu PRIMERGY servers are now certified and available for Windows Server 2022 – the latest version of one of the most popular server operating systems (OS) and the heartbeat of datacentres around the world.
Adam Keuler is the product lead for the PRIMERGY server portfolio. Contact him at adam.keuler@cocre8.com for more information
PRIMEFLEX integrated systems
FUJITSU Integrated System PRIMEFLEX is an end-to-end portfolio of pre-defined, pre-integrated and pre-tested hybrid IT-enabled converged and hyper-converged solutions that are capable of modernising the datacentre and accelerating the journey to a data-driven enterprise.
Developed for modern workloads, Integrated System PRIMEFLEX can be rapidly and easily integrated into existing operations to increase operational efficiency. The PRIMEFLEX portfolio is comprised of a series of hybrid-enabled converged and hyper-converged infrastructure solutions developed in partnership with major Fujitsu technology partners and offering ready-to-run solutions and reference architectures; adaptable to customer-specific requirements; simplified operation and maintenance; end-to-end solution support from a single point of contact.
Shawn Jubber is the senior solutions architect (integrated systems and SAP) at CoCre8. Contact him at shawn.jubber@cocre8.com for more information
ETERNUS storage
Fujitsu is a world-leading data management and data protection solutions provider. Combining ETERNUS storage systems with its portfolio of comprehensive services and leading partner technologies, delivers optimal data storage solutions that give customers the right data service levels and reduce costs.
As digital transformation gathers pace, storage solutions with smart data efficiency functions will be needed to help organise storage systems and make the right data available at the right time. And, looking ahead, digital business growth, digital business continuity and digital business efficiency will have an enormous impact on data storage environments.
Leon Leibach is the product lead: storage and data protection at CoCre8. Contact him at leon.leibach@cocre8.com for more information.
NetApp
As the cloud becomes more pervasive and cost-effective, it’s become imperative to properly manage workloads both on-premise and in the cloud.
NetApp bring the enterprise-grade data services customers rely on into the cloud, and the simple flexibility of cloud into the data centre.
NetApp’s industry-leading solutions work across diverse environments and the world’s biggest clouds.
Offerings include native cloud services, cloud storage technology, simple cloud management, enterprise-grade cloud capabilities, cloudlike flexibility, and openness and independence.
Phil Bradley is the NetApp business manager at CoCre8. Contact him at phil.bradley@cocre8.com for more information.