Case Study: Leading Multinational Navigation Systems Leader achieves major AFF capacity relief and reduced storage costs with NetApp Cloud Tiering

Multinational Navigation Technology Developer Frees Up AFF Space with Cloud Tiering

A Dutch multinational navigation-technology developer headquartered in Amsterdam, with more than 5,000 employees and operations in 30 countries, faced a storage-capacity problem: their on‑premises NetApp AFF platform for production applications was approaching 1 PB and growing, so the storage team needed a way to offload cold data and snapshots to the cloud to extend capacity without adding hardware.

By using NetApp Cloud Tiering through the same Cloud Manager they already used for Cloud Volumes ONTAP, the team ran a short proof of concept and tiered 200 TB of snapshots and cold data to Azure Blob storage. The move freed AFF space, lowered storage costs, and allowed ongoing, transparent tiering of cold data to scale capacity without impacting end-user access or performance.