In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, businesses grapple with economic challenges that make budgeting for technology increasingly complex. The traditional CapEx model demands upfront payments for infrastructure that depreciates over time, often resulting in overspending due to unpredictable capacity needs.
In response, IT leaders are turning to flexible, subscription-based solutions like NetApp Keystone, which offers storage as a service (STaaS) to deliver cost efficiency, agility, and a seamless bridge to a cloud operating model.
Economic Challenges of IT Infrastructure
Upfront infrastructure investments often lead to complex chargeback models, holding departments accountable for their capacity usage. With IT budgets tightening, tracking consumption and allocating resources efficiently becomes critical.
Many companies adopt a cloud-first strategy, prioritizing cloud migration over infrastructure refreshes. Yet, aging on-premises systems increase real estate and energy costs, undermining savings.
Maintaining data storage infrastructure is another hurdle, as varying update schedules for different solutions complicate tracking and budgeting for renewals.
NetApp Keystone Consumption Model
NetApp Keystone introduces a consumption-based approach, allowing businesses to access block, file, and object storage across on-premises and cloud environments via a single subscription. With STaaS, organizations pay only for what they use, eliminating unnecessary costs.
Capacity scales instantly to match workload demands, bypassing lengthy procurement delays. Companies can expand within their data centers, reducing dependence on public cloud scaling. Billing is simplified into one invoice consisting of price per TiB, per month for data storage for both on-premises and in the cloud.
This model also frees businesses from managing legacy hardware refreshes, shifting focus from maintenance to modernizing and optimizing digital workloads.
Reducing Costs Through Management
NetApp Keystone’s management tools enhance flexibility, cutting IT infrastructure costs. Unified storage management simplifies provisioning, monitoring, and moving data across hybrid cloud environments for efficient resource use.
Users can dynamically assign storage volumes to performance tiers—Extreme, Premium, Performance, Standard, and Value—ranging from 128 IOPs and 4MB/s throughput per TiB to 12.2K IOPs and 384MB/s per TiB. Automatic tiering shifts infrequently accessed data to lower-cost object storage, either on-site or in the cloud, ensuring companies only pay for high-performance storage when needed.
Data can be consolidated, burst to the cloud, or returned to higher-cost storage as required, lowering the total cost of ownership (TCO).
Benefits of an OpEx Model
NetApp Keystone shifts storage costs from capital expenses (CapEx) to operating expenses (OpEx), reducing upfront spending. This simplifies purchasing, minimizes investment risks, and eliminates prolonged procurement cycles.
The subscription model offers predictable expenses and right-sized storage, preventing overprovisioning. Its pay-as-you-go structure aligns costs with usage while enabling seamless scaling.
Features of the NetApp Keystone Consumption Model
NetApp Keystone’s features drive cost efficiency, reduce TCO, and boost ROI. Here’s how:
- Pay for Performance: Outcome-based tiers for file, block, and object storage let companies adjust performance to meet evolving workload needs.
- Pay as You Grow: Users enjoy the predictable rates for subscribed capacity, and can leverage onsite burst capacity at the same rate for spikes in demand with pay-for-use consumption
- Flexible Terms for Less Risk: Commitments start at just one year, with optional 12-month renewals, offering flexibility and reducing long-term risk.
- Leverage Hybrid Cloud: Orchestration unifies management and provisioning, integrating cloud capabilities for bursting, disaster recovery, and ransomware detection.
- Automated Tiering: Move cold data to lower-cost on-premises or cloud storage, potentially saving up to 50% on costs.
- Move Storage to OpEx: Transitioning to a 100% OpEx model eliminates future technology debt and large upfront investments.
- Built-in data protection: Industry-defining protection through snapshots, vaulting, and replication ensure nearly 100% availability at the standard rate.
Saving Money by Reducing Risk
NetApp Keystone mitigates financial losses with robust ransomware detection and recovery. Ransomware remains a costly threat, driving expenses through ransoms and downtime.
Keystone’s foundation is built upon well-architected and resilient storage systems that recover quickly, minimizing economic fallout. Beyond prevention, it detects attacks, alerts users, and locks suspect data with snapshots for full restoration if needed.
Getting on the Path to Keystone NetApp
As a NetApp Premier Partner, Red8 can help your company transition to a subscription-based consumption model by adopting NetApp Keystone. We have partnered with NetApp for 25 years and were named Growth Partner of the Year 2023.
Red8 starts with an assessment of your current environment to align your requirements with the right NetApp Keystone service levels. Additionally, we can perform a Health Check to find innovative ways to better your current consumption model by maximizing your utilization while lowering your costs.
With Red8, STaaS via NetApp Keystone provides a unified, consumption-based approach for digital workloads.
Reach out to Red8 to request an assessment of your current environment and find out how NetApp Keystone can meet your requirements.
