NetApp helps address customers’ top 3 storage challenges for success

Data continues to be one of the most critical assets in the world today. It’s crucial for customers to maintain high availability and performance, and to protect their data from ransomware and similar attacks. To optimize these outcomes, data environments must be maintained, upgraded, and monitored—the days of “deploy and forget” are gone. And when problems do occur, customers need a top-class support environment to restore services ASAP.

Data now lives in a lot of different places: on premises, in a private cloud, in a public cloud, in a multicloud—or a mix of all. Data is spread across multiple vendors, and new data is being created daily. With IT support staff constantly squeezed, managing and maintaining these diverse environments is a challenge.

As a dedicated, personal resource, we talk with hundreds of our customers (large and small) every day and have a clear understanding of their unique objectives, challenges, and success criteria. Regardless of the size of customer or their environment, their challenges and priorities are remarkably similar. Essentially, customers want to improve availability by reducing risks, spend less time managing their NetApp estate, achieve their business goals, and get the most from their investment in NetApp® technology. The following lists show the top customer challenges and priorities.

So, how do you juggle these conflicting priorities and deliver more with limited resources?

NetApp’s solution is an assigned Support Account Manager (SAM) who personally helps our customers manage and maintain their environments. The NetApp SAM partners with our customers’ teams to navigate their challenges, minimize TCO, maximize value, and achieve their business objectives. SAMs enable customers to maintain the high standards that they demand, and by doing the groundwork so that they can avoid common issues.

We know that customers with SAMs experience fewer disruptions and increased availability. Customers are also more satisfied at every stage of their NetApp journey than customers without SAMs. We know this because they’ve told us, and the data supports these conclusions.

Customers with SAMs see real, measurable improvements in their NetApp estate. The SAM acts as our customers’ advocate within NetApp, providing proactive recommendations and guidance, coordinating resources to address any issues, and getting involved when assistance is needed. All of these activities lead to significantly improved outcomes:

• 57% less disruption time
• 33% faster resolution for priority 1 cases and 40% faster resolution for priority 2 cases
• Faster risk resolution
• Faster recommended release adoption
• Higher levels of storage efficiency and availability

What can a SAM do for you? A SAM will improve data and system availability while reducing the amount of time you and your team spend managing your NetApp estate and problem-solving. This frees up your IT staff to spend their time on other business priorities, improves your return on your NetApp investment, and increases satisfaction at every stage of your NetApp journey.

“Our Support Account Manager (SAM) ensures the success of our NetApp environment while allowing us to focus on what is truly critical and requires our immediate attention. This helps keep our NetApp environment running smoothly and enables us to focus on more strategic initiatives, instead of tending to IT issues.”

Balaji Alahari
Manager of Storage, Data Center, and Network Operations
DreamWorks Animation

In our next blog post, we’ll introduce you to the SAM role and explain exactly how SAMs perform their magic.

If you can’t wait until then, take a look at our SAM service description, or talk to your NetApp representative.

To learn more how SAM services contribute to the bottom line for NetApp customers, read our other blogs:

• NetApp SAM customers report up to 57% less disruption time

• How NetApp SAMs help customers: Three real-world scenarios

• How NetApp customers gain a competitive edge and accelerate innovation: SAM