Keystone: One subscription, one management, unlimited flexibility

Businesses thrive on data. And the agility, capacity, and performance of the systems you choose to store, manage, and secure that data can make the difference between gaining a competitive edge or falling behind the pack. To stay ahead of rapidly increasing data growth, ever-changing storage innovation, complex storage operations, and mounting IT costs, enterprises need to rethink how they purchase and consume data storage. Many are choosing to adopt storage-as-a-service (STaaS) strategies to shift the cost and effort of managing data storage infrastructure and technology to a third-party vendor.

STaaS can make storage operations simpler and more agile by enabling a company to easily scale up storage resources (as business demands change) and keep abreast of technology innovation without investing in new hardware. In addition, these subscription-based solutions typically provide value-added features such file sharing, backup management, and high performance and availability SLAs. The current landscape of STaaS players provides an excess of choices, all competing on product innovation, technological advancements, pricing strategies, and customer service for file, block, and object storage (in the data center and/or cloud).

But not all STaaS offers are created equal—the NetApp Keystone^® portfolio has raised the bar on STaaS. We’ve made it an easy choice with flexible multideployment hybrid cloud storage capabilities―on premises, in any cloud, or anywhere in between―all from a single monthly billing and a single, unified management console.

By adopting an on-premises as-a-service business model to modernize your storage environment, you can gain tremendous benefits for simplifying and accelerating IT operations, advancing digital initiatives, and speeding innovation. Keystone takes STaaS one step further. Fully embracing hybrid multicloud, Keystone delivers STaaS as a seamless hybrid multicloud experience that streamlines IT storage management with a single subscription for a true cloudlike user experience. Because it removes the IT overhead of managing storage infrastructures and lengthy procurement cycles, you can achieve faster business outcomes and make your operations more agile. Also, it facilitates better alignment of storage costs to business needs, accelerates the move of IT operations to a hybrid cloud, and empowers IT teams to focus their attention on core business operations by managing outcomes, not equipment.

1-to-5-year commitment options can include both on-premises storage and cloud storage services that support all major cloud providers: AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. And you can purchase NetApp^® Cloud Volumes ONTAP^® and NetApp BlueXP^™ backup and recovery services under the single monthly subscription as the on-premises storage services (file, block, and object data services).

Native integration with the BlueXP^™ console makes IT storage management easy. Get a unified management experience for monitoring and orchestrating your hybrid cloud—on premises, next to the cloud, or in the cloud—from a single pane of glass. You can even use the BlueXP digital wallet to dynamically reallocate your storage spending across clouds for ultimate financial and operational flexibility. This capability is ideal for organizations that expect to migrate data or workloads to the cloud in future months, quarters, or years. You have the freedom to shift capacity allocation across sites, while maintaining a single invoice and the same overall spending.

Using BlueXP as a single management console, you can simplify and centralize Keystone operations to:

• Deploy new or discover existing systems
• Manage connected multicloud environments
• Display initial views of all connected environments
• Manage your subscriptions for both on-premises and cloud storage services

Keystone offers several service options, including a new Performance service tier designed to address the low-latency, high-performance demands of OLTP, OLAP, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), containers, and software development workloads. With Keystone, you have tremendous flexibility to optimize costs by selecting the performance tier that matches your workload requirements for file and block, object, and cloud storage services.

Core data protection and tiering capabilities, such as NetApp Snapshot^™ copies, vaulting (SnapVault^®), replication (SnapMirror^®), WORM compliance (SnapLock^® Enterprise), and data tiering to a NetApp target, are built into the Keystone standard subscription rate. These features simplify data protection, reduce overall business risk, and keep your data protected. You just need to add the low-cost storage capacity required for your data protection needs.

Keystone provides Autonomous Ransomware Protection (ARP) for monitoring at every data access point. If a ransomware attack is suspected, this built-in feature automatically makes Snapshot copies of point-in-time data. If the ARP feature detects suspicious or abnormal activity, it locks data and delivers alerts to enable quick recovery of data from Snapshot copies.

To ensure more efficient operations, Keystone has raised the bar on hybrid cloud data management with a program of guarantees that enable you to:

• Deploy business-critical workloads with 99.999% availability without exceeding the stated maximum number of watts per tebibyte (TiB) for our ONTAP flash platforms.
• Minimize your carbon footprint for both file and block services and reduce your overall environmental impact with continuous monitoring and measuring.
• Deliver predictable performance—latency (in milliseconds per service level) measured for all volumes every 5 minutes to consistently meet your customers’ and/or users’ expectations.

This program of service-credit-backed guarantees is included with all Keystone solutions at no additional cost.

NetApp offers a fully managed service for an additional monthly fee that’s applied to the Keystone invoice. Data migration services can migrate existing data onto the Keystone infrastructure and apply it to the Keystone monthly bill based on completed milestones.

Keystone offers an ideal way to support workload management across a hybrid multicloud environment. Workloads can be migrated from Keystone on premises to NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP or the BlueXP backup and recovery service located in AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud—all under the same subscription. As data moves, the cost is also transferable from the on-premises environment to the cloud.

Keystone also supports backup to the cloud, reducing the need to manage multiple data center sites independently. And when cloud bursting occurs, IT can use the same technology on and off premises to simplify the management of application environments that are spread across a hybrid cloud infrastructure.

Real hybrid cloud storage as a service in a single subscription is here today with NetApp Keystone. Now with a unified management console and a single monthly bill for both on-premises and cloud data storage services, you can choose to easily provision, monitor, and even reallocate spending across your hybrid multicloud environment for the ultimate in financial and operational flexibility.

If you’re interested in Keystone, talk to an expert.