Case Study: Festo achieves optimized data center usage and reduced storage costs with NetApp Cloud Tiering

How Cloud Tiering Helps an Industrial Giant in Germany Optimize Data Center Usage

A multinational industrial control and automation company headquartered in Esslingen, Germany, that develops pneumatic and electrical control and drive solutions across more than 35 verticals wanted to get more out of its on‑premises storage and reduce data center costs. Although it follows a cloud‑first strategy and already runs SAP on Azure with NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP, the IT team saw additional value after acquiring NetApp AFF all‑flash arrays and sought a way to leverage public cloud for colder data.

The company deployed NetApp Cloud Tiering (with AFF arrays) using a snapshot‑only policy to automatically tier snapshots older than 48 hours from about 200 volumes on two ONTAP 9.3 systems to AWS S3, and has been expanding the service to more volumes. This freed on‑prem capacity and significantly lowered storage costs; encouraged by the results, the company is now evaluating full‑volume tiering to automatically move cold active data between AFF arrays and cloud object storage.

Festo