NetApp collaborates to expand services | Bangkok Post: tech

CLOUD COMPUTING

Weera Areeratanasak, Country Manager of NetApp (Thailand), said the company, together with Cisco and VMware, has expanded its services to deliver end-to-end Secure Multi-tenancy Design Architecture that provides enhanced security in shared virtual and enterprise cloud environments by isolating the information technology resources and applications of different clients, business units or departments that share a common IT infrastructure.

As part of their collaboration, Cisco, NetApp and VMware will also offer a cooperative support model for these pre-tested and validated design architectures to help customers quickly build a unified, virtualised infrastructure.

This will help customers' adoption of virtualisation and implement the technology faster than in the past.

More importantly, this will help enterprise customers better utilise their IT resources by consolidating silo resources as a single unified architecture and manage IT as a dynamic asset which reduces cost by up to 50 percent.

Mongkol Asawakowitkorn, director of business development advanced technology of Cisco Thailand, added that unified architecture by virtualisation of the network, server and storage helps enterprise customers design and build a complete, virtualised dynamic data centre that will streamline operations and improve their business resilience.

This collaboration will help to reduce customers' time for testing concepts to one month compared with the previous three months its took them to decide to implement the technology.

"In Thailand, only 10 percent of enterprises implement virtualisation and only few implement private cloud. Most of them have not rushed to use it because of its complexity so this will accelerate the adoption," Mongkol said.

Weera continued that over the past six years, the company has collaborated in marketing with Cisco and VMware, but this time they will join together as one sales team to offer services to customers in the financial, government, telecom and utility sectors and offer frontline local support from DataCraft and MFEC.

Asked how NetApp viewed EMC's announcement of its collaboration with Cisco and VMware to build the Virtual Computing Environment coalition, Weera said that the move by the technology vendors will be better for customers as an alternative choice for them.

Smuth Thanadsarng, Country Manager Thailand at VMware, added that this collaboration will lead to dynamic data centres and provide the foundation for both private and public clouds with the ability to move data and applications between these clouds.

Earlier this year, HP and Microsoft also announced their three-year agreement to invest $250 million to significantly simplify technology environments by collaborating on an engineering road map for data management machines; converged, prepackaged application solutions and comprehensive virtualisation offerings as well as integrated management tools.

This will respond to changing business requirements by seamlessly converging server, storage, network and application resources in a highly automated, self-managed environment.

"The Information Technology industry is in the midst of a radical transformation as companies look for flexible, unified computing architectures that can deliver dynamic, on-demand services cost effectively," said Russ Fellows, senior partner, Evaluator Group.

"The driving force behind this shift is the need to align IT costs with business by shifting from static single-purpose IT systems to new on-demand IT services available in the data centres of the future."