Subscribe to the Blog
© 2021 Global Storage. All rights reserved. Privacy Policy
Announcing the Global Storage Partnership with NetApp
Global Storage are excited to announce their partnership with NetApp Australia Pty. Ltd. The five-year agreement will allow Global Storage to offer Managed Services now in partnership with NetApp using NetApp data management platforms.
“The NetApp partnership will showcase a number of options for storage management to customers wishing to adopt in cloud or on-premise managed services. Primarily we will be focussing on backup, disaster recovery, infrastructure and Office365 managed services, with additional products to follow.”
Gavin Hoffmann, Sales & Marketing Director – Global Storage.
The partnership with NetApp highlights Global Storage’s focus to strengthen its holistic approach to data management and protection. The joint teams will work together to ensure customers have superior options for data management, data protection, analytics, IOT and security.
As customers demand more freedom-of-choice in these areas, and consider the best outcome in terms of cloud, hybrid cloud and on-premise locality, the idea of a universal data management service becomes an ever more important value add to Business and to the protection of business critical data and operations.
NetApp is the data authority for hybrid cloud, providing a full range of hybrid cloud data services that simplify management of applications and data across cloud and on-premises environments to accelerate digital transformation. Together with our partners, we empower global organisations to unleash the full potential of their data to expand customer touch-points, foster greater innovation, and optimise their operations. For more information, visit www.netapp.com. #DataDriven
Get in touch with the Global Storage team now to learn more about how our full suite of data management solutions can help your Business achieve their data management goals.
Office 365 Cloud Backup As a Service: Introducing DataReady
Have you been considering transitioning to Microsoft Office 365? Many businesses are transitioning to cloud, but whether this is a partial or full transition, businesses should be asking; is my cloud data properly protected?
Microsoft O365 protects from data loss using retention policies. These policies offer limited recovery capabilities and are not a long-term solution. Microsoft O365’s legal hold creates an archive copy of the data but not a backup, exposing the business and its data.
Exposure can come in the form of data that is corrupted, infected, accidentally or maliciously deleted. Data is retained typically for a period of 30 – 90 days depending on the content (OneDrive, SharePoint, Mail, Teams). If businesses do not protect themselves for long-term backup and recovery strategies, they are at risk of data loss beyond the standard Microsoft offering.
Global Storage have recently launched a solution to this challenge, ensuring all critical business data is protected. Working under the existing Backup as a Service, Global Storage can now protect all Microsoft Office 365 data from data loss and offer simple recovery options.
DataReady O365 Backup Cloud Service is a managed service that provides backup and recoverability to your businesses data. Global Storage use market leading technologies to protect your data, ensuring it stays onshore in Australia in a geo-redundant data repository outside of the Microsoft tenancy.
Protection services are across Office 365 content, including Mail, Archive, SharePoint, Teams and OneDrive. Recover your lost data through a user portal managed by your IT Administrators or contact Global Storage for assisted recovery options.
Need more detail or technical information? Get in contact for a discussion with our team on your specific requirements.
Data Protection in the Cloud
With the increasing trend of organisations thinking of or currently migrating critical production workloads to the cloud whether it’s a hybrid or public provider model it is still important to look at your data protection, there are the obvious advantages and benefits over the private cloud model and these have been documented numerous times and there is no need to go into detail about them again, but just to refresh a cloud should provide infrastructure, environmental, human resource and software licensing savings; this in turn allows the business to focus strategically on core business services.
The advantages are clear but what other critical requirements are there? Does disaster recovery, business continuity, backup and archiving compliance ring a bell? It is important when an organisation is in the process of choosing a cloud provider that along with providing robust IaaS SLAs that the provider can also provide data protection SLAs.
Has the provider had previous disaster recovery experience? Can it provide your organisation with a clear path during a disaster? Does the provider in fact provide backup, archiving and restore functionality at all? Who maintains the backup, archive and disaster recovery? Is the disaster recovery tested? Cloud providers located at Tier 3 data centres provide numerous N+1 redundancy features but the fact remains there have been two Tier 1 vendor outages in the last 6 months that affected hundreds of customers. So whether you organisation is looking or currently moving towards either a public or hybrid cloud strategy ask the provider about data protection, your data is your business.
Shrinking Legacy IT Business sees HDS Grow in the Cloud
Historically known as an enterprise storage-focused vendor, Hitachi Data System continues to work its way into the cloud market, which it sees as a “growth opportunity” and complementary to its long-time storage business.
Speaking with ZDNet, Adrian De Luca, Hitachi Data Systems Asia-Pacific chief technology officer, said that given the changing needs of its legacy customers, it was important for the business to take the leap and traverse into the world of cloud, too.
“There’s no secret that legacy IT is shrinking,” he said.
“Certainly the selling of our legacy components such as standalone storage has been a depressed business, but we’re still growing. The reason why we’re still growing is because of private and hybrid cloud.”
In fact, De Luca said HDS is finding its strength is in the private cloud space where the company has seen that side of the business double year-on-year. He said there’s a clear market for private cloud in Australia as many of the company’s existing enterprise customers are after the consumption and automation model, as well as the self-service model of cloud, but still want to retain their existing SLAs.
“Our enterprise customers have a lot of legacy systems; they’ve got legacy skills and fixed investments such as datacentres, so for them it seems like a quantum leap to move the cloud. So they need to typically take smaller and more incremental steps into cloud,” he said.
“What we’ve done is tried to build a journey for a lot of those customers. It’s something we call ‘your cloud, your way’.”
Unlike other traditional vendors such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard — which are also transitioning their business into the cloud market — HDS’s approach to cloud has been through setting up cloud partnerships. In the last two months, the company has signed partnerships with Brisbane-based SureBridge IT, Victoria-based Global Storage, and Avnet to help resell its cloud services onshore across the country. HDS’s offerings are also integrated to work with key software vendors including VMware and SAP.
“HDS is a partner-centric company. Unlike IBM and HP, they want to build the datacentre and run them. We know what we’re really good at but we also recognise the things that we need to partner with,” De Luca said.
While HDS is strategically playing to its strengths in the private cloud market, the vendor hasn’t completely neglected the public cloud space either. While De Luca acknowledged the company is going up against some of the biggest players including Amazon and Google that have “certainly validated a new business model”, HDS is prepared to be part of it.
In June, the company announced a number of mobility products so it could integrate public cloud offerings and extend its technology portfolio.
“What we talked about is how we can take, for example, our archive platform and actually connect a public cloud behind it. Our file serving can also leverage public cloud. This is all a big maturity change or step change of HDS in Australia. We’ve not only recognised cloud, but we’re also becoming successful in it,” said De Luca.
The plan of attack for HDS will be to target the smaller end of town, the SME market, an area that the company hasn’t traditionally been involved in before, but according to De Luca is responding better to moving to the cloud.
“I think what is happening here is that we have a clever SME community who are saying that they’re not going to bother hosting their own cloud, or buy their own components, but are going straight to a cloud service provider for all of that,” he said.
“But what they’re saying is they want to go to a local cloud service provider because they want that customer service onshore. So we’ve created a cloud service provider unit that is focused on our multinational service providers.”
The only challenge now for the company is to convince the rest of the market that HDS is serious about being a key cloud vendor.
“Quite frankly our challenge is being recognised in the market for providing these services,” De Luca said.
“We’re not a strong marketing company but we power a lot of the technology behind these local providers, so we’re happy to be the silent partner in this.”
