NetApp helps streamline our internal operations. I come from a background as a VMware administrator. For me, SnapCenter alone is a great product for when something goes wrong with a virtual machine, even though we have a separate data protection solution besides that. The speed at which you can recover from when it is all snapshot-based is good. You do not have to wait for copies across the network. It is a real game changer in a situation where we tried to do an upgrade but that did not go well and now that needs to be reverted back to where we were an hour ago. Usually, in 30 seconds, we get that VM back up and running. It makes the recovery quick. Even though we have another solution, which is also pretty fast, being able to take advantage of those logical operations inside the array is a real game-changer performance. The data reduction that we get is fantastic because some of our applications have so many copies of different versions as they are going through different levels of testing and development. Being able to deduplicate against each other saves a lot of the footprint.
The All Flash series in general has delivered the most value to our organization. That took care of the daily performance issues that we had. When I started with the company, there would be overhead announcements on the PA that some of our internal systems were running slow and asked people to stop using them for a little bit while they caught up. All of those went away overnight when we switched to the All Flash FAS solution. There has not been any performance issue with storage so far. It has been eight years. Our account exec says that if we go to BlueXP or Cloud Insights, we can look at all the performance data. I never go ahead and look at it because our latency is under a millisecond all the time, so all of our applications are happy. Our developers are happy. Our internal customers are happy. I do not spend a lot of time worrying about performance anymore because we just have it.
I would rate this technology a solid eight out of ten. I only have one criticism, which I have also shared with my account exec in the past, but it is not a strong criticism. I understood 7-mode very well back in the day. It was a pretty simple concept. When you are making a leap from there to cluster data ONTAP, there are so many more interfaces, and I have so much more going on in what I do in my job. It is like I do not have quite the mental map in my head of how the whole system works as I used to. Fortunately, we have a great partner we work with. They have helped us for over a decade. They are now CDW, but they used to be Sirius previously. They have a couple of great resources with whom we have worked for a long time. They have helped build our environment over the years, and they are always happy to answer our call if we call them. So, for me, that counterbalances some of that complexity. I do not understand it at the level that I would like to because I do not have the time to dig into and understand all the lifts versus the physical interfaces versus all of the networking that goes on in there. However, I can always call our partner that we work with, or even text them. They will answer my call even if it is eight o'clock on a Friday night and help us out. It is not that the solution does not work for us. It is just that I used to know how 7-mode works so much better just because it was simpler, but I understand that some of that complexity comes as a result of the flexibility and the power and the cluster data ONTAP unlocks. We can have multiple SVMs and the ability to have all these different identities and tenants contained inside of one platform, which we could not do with the 7-mode previously.
Because of the All Flash technology, we do not have any performance issues. Another benefit that we are seeing is the reduction in footprint when we replace the old spinning disk system. It was a rack and a half of a disk. The A700 that we are about to load in there is going to be 5U or 8U. It is really small. Especially, at the Colo facility where our DR site is, we pay by the rack. That saves us money every month on a reduced footprint. I cannot say how much money it saves, but I know it also saves us the power bill. Flash is so much more energy efficient. We do not have that cooling load and power load, and then, we obviously have the performance. Performance is not a concern that we have anymore.
A couple of years ago, we decided to make an investment in hardening. It is a little bit stronger against ransomware. We made the commitment to purchase an additional FAS 8300, and we are using SnapLock technology to take daily snapshots of our environment and send them over to that separate FAS 8300, which is in a separate authentication domain using the Cyber Vault concept. All immutable snapshots are over there. We have hardened our primary arrays too with MFA technology and everything else. If we are ever attacked or a victim of a ransomware attack for some reason, we at least have another copy locked away immediately that goes back several months in that other environment. Even if we lose some short-term data, we will still have more long-term copies of our data to go back to. That was another big chunk of spending for an array that does not do anything in terms of production. It just sits there. We hope we never need it, but at the same time, it is nice having that peace of mind that we have done the immutable technology in the NetApp's technologies, and we have done immutable technology inside our Cohesity backup product as well. We have two levels of immutable copies of our data, so we are fairly confident that we will be able to recover something.
It gives us the performance we need and the reliability we need to make sure that our systems have the uptime that our internal customers demand. It has been a very reliable solution for us. Especially since we have moved to the All Flash series, we have not had a single performance-related issue.
