NetApp IT ups its game with personalized, proactive SAM support

NetApp’s Enterprise IT is an actual customer and IT practitioner of NetApp’s products and services. NetApp IT is a massive storage user, with over 140 petabytes accounting for over 450+ storage controllers and over 5,000 servers. To meet today’s modern storage services requirements, NetApp IT recognizes and leverages a hybrid cloud strategy to solve real business challenges faced as a growing industry leader. As a product practitioner, NetApp IT inspires our customers through an authentic narrative on the innovative adoption of NetApp technology as Customer One.

We asked Robert Pearson and Dave Tanigawa of IT Operations and Engineering at NetApp about their experience with NetApp SAM Services.

As NetApp IT, we are Customer One for all NetApp technologies. Our mission is the support of the NetApp corporate IT storage backbone that encompasses all the data storage that's used internally by NetApp itself, including SAP, ERP, databases, homegrown applications, and VMware. It also includes internal developers who are doing things like automation and working on internal applications to drive further efficiencies.

We are tasked with implementing all NetApp technologies to whatever extent that makes sense for our use case. Additionally, we use all NetApp storage platforms, just like our customers do: ONTAP (our primary storage platform), StorageGRID, E-Series, and NetApp cloud data services from partners such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

The personal level of care that we receive from our Support Account Manager (SAM) has been invaluable in bringing to our attention risks, such as AutoSupport related issues, systems with critical and high risks or case count, hardware that is approaching end of support, and legacy product features that are being deprecated. We are always looking at addressing security vulnerabilities, and some of the feedback that we get from our SAM helps us to address those issues. This additional input helps us to more efficiently prioritize and plan our efforts to address these various concerns.

Our regular interactions with our SAM provide an extra measure of assurance that we will be appropriately informed regarding any new announcements or changes that we should be aware of. By ensuring that our systems are registered accurately and that they have active support entitlements, our SAM makes sure that we don’t ever have to worry about misdirected support interactions or delays resulting from expired or missing entitlements. Our SAM has also been helpful in escalating occasional support cases requiring more advanced technical expertise to ensure that we receive the most responsive support experience possible.

Because the NetApp IT environment is very large, a lot of the IT staff’s time and effort is focused on day-to-day system changes, projects, and problems. The SAM has frequent meetings with the team to review our environment and inform us of what systems are not up to date with software and firmware. They also inform us of bugs and issues that NetApp Engineering/Development have discovered. This is very beneficial because it makes us aware of problems that could directly impact our day-to-day operations and the management of our network and devices. This also helps prevent major outages due to bugs/software issues. In addition, if we are not getting timely updates from Technical Support, the SAM can reach out to the engage the support teams to get issues resolved quickly.

Our SAM works cross-functionally with support, engineering, and various other cross functional teams across NetApp to ensure that our problems are being fixed quickly and that our technical and process concerns are resolved.
This frees up time that would otherwise be spent by a team member addressing these issues.

More information:

• Support Account Manager
• SAM Knowledge Base
• ONTAP
• BlueXP
• Active IQ