Engineering innovation

In an exclusive interview, Maya Zakhour, director Channel Sales - MEA, Italy and Spain at NetApp, shares how they continue to transform in order to meet the needs of their partners and customers

Digital transformation has taken a quantum leap during the pandemic. So, how are you meeting the demands of your customers?

More than 70 per cent of companies accelerated their digital transformation plans by at least a year, with the cloud being a key driver. However, a sharp increase in adoption combined with everfaster release cycles raises concerns about efficiency, cost and security. We aim to advise customers on solutions using best-of-breed products with partners like Ingram Micro. As a preferred NetApp value added distributor, Ingram Micro enables business partners to operate more efficiently and successfully in the markets they serve.

At NetApp, our customers come first, and we continually transform ourselves better to meet the needs of our partners and customers. Enterprises must optimise their cloud costs and secure their cloud configurations.

Spot by NetApp revolutionises cloud infrastructure consumption where we harness advanced analytics and automation to deliver continuous optimisation. As a result, customers save up to 90 per cent of their cloud cost while maintaining the application’s SLA and SLO.

We partner with all major cloud providers to ensure our partners and customers have a choice. We’re also co-engineering innovative solutions and embedding them directly into the services of each cloud provider to make it easier than ever to work with us. Microsoft, Amazon and Google uniquely sell and support NetApp’s storage services.

Tell us about your Kubernetes data management platform - Astra Data Store.

In April 2020, we announced Astra by NetApp with the mission to make stateful applications on Kubernetes as easy for customers to run and manage as stateless applications. Ever since, we have delivered on this mission with innovations such as Astra Control - the industry’s first fully managed applicationaware Kubernetes data management service. Over the past seven months, we have introduced Astra Control Service in Google Cloud and Azure and extended support for hybrid cloud deployments with self-managed software for applications running Kubernetes on-premises. In addition, Astra Control allows customers to build backup, disaster recovery, cloning and migration workflows for Kubernetes applications using the same UI and API regardless of where they run.

NetApp is also known for its on-prem data management. What is new in your portfolio for organisations to run their business-critical applications on-prem?

NetApp has introduced the new AFF A900 and ONTAP enterprise edition for business-critical enterprise applications. The AFF A900 offers organisations the data storage performance to accelerate their business-critical enterprise database and application needs, the security and reliability to keep customer data available and secure, and the simplicity and flexibility that agile organisations require. The AFF A900 also delivers an enhanced user experience for managing organisations’ most essential enterprise databases like Oracle, SAP HANA, Microsoft SQL Server and virtualised applications.

With the ONTAP enterprise edition and the new anti-ransomware suite, organisations have built-in data protection and anti-ransomware solutions for preemption and post-attack recovery to prevent catastrophic data loss and economic costs.

The AFF A900 is available as a nondisruptive in-chassis upgrade to existing A700 customers, simplifying the refresh and eliminating disruptions to missioncritical operations with advanced reliability, availability, and serviceability (or RAS) capabilities. Additionally, ONTAP software automatically applies firmware updates to increase operational efficiency and simplify day-to-day activities for IT teams. And our Keystone’s support for the AFF A900 provides companies operational and financial flexibility to consume storage and data services in the model that best suits the needs of the business.