According to industry hype, businesses are throwing all of their resources and budgets at cloud adoption in an effort to cut costs and realise new infrastructure flexibility. But as discussed previously on the CDS news blog (and in our free whitepaper “Is Cloud The Answer?”) the reality is that organisations are being more cautious as they try and understand the new challenges presented by hosted infrastructure. Many are instead choosing to stick with onsite storage and support, particularly for legacy storage applications.
To help these businesses, NetApp has recently announced support for the PoINT Storage Manager application with its inclusion in the official third party add-ons list. PoINT has been designed to assist with file tiering, so that data managers can better maintain storage and ensure that mission critical data and archive information are better segregated to take advantage of the most appropriate storage hardware. Regularly accessed, mission-critical data is stored on the highest performing systems, whilst archive data is directed to older hardware platforms – or even magnetic tape if appropriate.
Although NetApp has a vested interest in selling new hardware, PoINT Storage Manager is potentially of greatest value to those organisations with systems nearing end of service life. The application provides a relatively simple, non-disruptive way to redeploy older hardware as part of a properly tiered storage infrastructure. There is also the possibility of adding off-lease systems to augment storage at a lower cost.
In the long-term, applications like PoINT provide a useful way for businesses to build the storage solutions that best suit their data needs. Rather than accepting some of the quirks and limitations of a hosted service, they can build infrastructure that is tailored exactly to their operations – often without any significant investment in new hardware.
For more help and advice about extending the usable lifespan of NetApp storage solutions beyond official EoSL, and for NetApp support, give the CDS team a call today on 
+1 866 237 8008 FREE.
– See more at: http://www.cds.net/news/2015/11/netapp-supports-point-onsite-storage/#sthash.OafCT3NO.dpuf