NetApp, the intelligent data infrastructure company, announced on September 11th that Anaplan, a leading market platform provider for business planning and decision-making, has selected NetApp as its primary storage provider. By adopting NetApp’s unified data storage to upgrade storage systems in four data centers around the world, Anaplan is consolidating the storage of its implementations in both public and private cloud, greatly simplifying its data operations and enabling innovation for its AI-focused solutions.
Anaplan’s AI-powered platform
Anaplan enables organizations across various industries to see, plan, and drive better business outcomes through its cloud-based SaaS platform built with AI. Anaplan’s customers can utilize its AI-powered platform to speed up decision-making processes while producing better outcomes, such as increasing revenue, improving sales, and refining forecasts.
Previous challenges and NetApp’s solution
To ensure it can reliably and effectively deploy its SaaS platform globally, Anaplan utilizes a combination of cloud providers and on-premises systems. Before selecting NetApp, Anaplan had to manage multiple storage platforms, slowing down and consuming more resources to run the necessary data operations to generate AI-driven insights for customers at scale.
When researching how to upgrade its aging storage infrastructure, Anaplan decided to consolidate its cloud and on-premises operations into an intelligent data infrastructure with NetApp, surpassing the performance, cost, replication, and availability requirements that Anaplan needs to innovate with AI.
Benefits of storage unification
Adam Thier, Product and Technology Director at Anaplan, stated: “At Anaplan, we are infusing AI at all levels of our platform so our customers can make better plans and achieve business objectives. Previously, our on-premises and cloud data ran on different platforms, at least doubling the amount of work needed to fuel our AI data pipelines. By transitioning to a unified data storage approach for on-premises and cloud, we can ensure that all modifications and configurations we use for our data management are applied across our entire environment. In short, NetApp enables us to do more with less.”
Technical implementation
Anaplan will utilize NetApp AFF Series C storage systems to provide the capacity needed to reliably and efficiently deliver its SaaS application to customers and achieve cost savings by tiering secondary data workloads on NetApp FAS storage arrays. To further drive efficiency in its data operations, Anaplan is leveraging native cloud storage services from public cloud providers built on NetApp ONTAP, allowing its IT team to easily manage data in a multi-cloud hybrid environment, a critical need to accelerate the data pipeline for AI.
NetApp MetroCluster configurations will also ensure high availability and protection for Anaplan’s data operations by enabling instant copies for backups and disaster recovery.
Impact on innovation
All this work streamlines data operations for Anaplan, enabling its technical team to focus on more challenging and high-value initiatives, such as experimenting with AI.
César Cernuda, President of NetApp, stated: “NetApp is uniquely positioned to support Anaplan’s AI operations. AI runs on data, and data runs on NetApp. NetApp provides comprehensive unified data storage that connects any data type, any workload, and any storage protocol, wherever our customers’ data may be.”
NetApp’s intelligent data infrastructure enables Anaplan to power its AI data operations and meet the high standards expected by its customers.