The NetApp Service Design Workshop: History, Benefits, and Evolution

The NetApp Service Design Workshop was created to help IT organizations transition from traditional infrastructure management to a service provider model. By connecting technology to business needs, organizations can modernize their IT operations and deliver measurable improvements in performance, cost efficiency, and agility.

The workshop emerged as a response to the growing complexity of IT environments, where data silos, new storage technologies, and cloud adoption often hinder digital transformation. By providing a structured methodology, the workshop helps IT teams break down these silos and align infrastructure with broader business objectives.

The workshop has evolved significantly since its inception. Initially, it focused on sharing NetApp IT’s internal best practices to improve our customers’ outcomes, but its scope has expanded. Over time, we broadened our approach to include security, AI, and virtualization -infrastructure optimization, all supported by our intelligent data infrastructure.

• Streamlined IT Operations: Organizations can optimize shared resources and standardize service levels by consolidating infrastructure and reducing complexity.
• Predictable Costs: Clearly defined service metrics provide transparency into storage costs and resource allocation.
• Enhanced Agility: Automation streamlines provisioning and orchestration, ensuring faster and more reliable service delivery.
• Improved Performance: Organizations can maintain high performance even during peak loads by designing services to meet application demands.
• Data Protection: Robust strategies for data replication, along with recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs) for asynchronous assurance-services strengthen resilience against data loss, and comprehensive application of a multi-layered approach to Ransomware identification, containment, and recovery for cybersecurity.

The workshop meets organizations wherever they are in their digital transformation journey. Whether a company has fully embraced the cloud and is refactoring and migrating on-premises workloads to cloud platforms or it is cautiously exploring cloud adoption and wants to estimate costs before fully embracing the cloud, this methodology provides value at every stage.

Some organizations may be repatriating workloads or bringing certain applications back from the cloud to on-premises data centers because of misaligned expectations or excessive costs. This methodology ensures that organizations can optimize performance and cost regardless of their cloud strategy.

The Service Design Workshop guides organizations through a structured five-step approach:

1. Assess Application Demands: Analyze workload distribution and identify storage, performance, and resilience needs.
2. Define Service Metrics: Establish clear performance indicators, such as IO density (IOPS/TiB) workload requirements, throughput, latency, and storage efficiency.
3. Design Storage and Compute Service Catalogs: Simplify storage service offerings into performance bands (e.g. slow, medium, fast) to match application requirements and identify standard “T-Shirt Sizes” for virtual machines, all with associated cost metrics for showback or chargeback.
4. Architect a Shared Infrastructure: Reduce complexity and costs with a scalable, multi-tiered storage environment.
5. Automate Delivery: Implement automation for provisioning, configuration, and monitoring observability to improve efficiency and reduce human error, including managed services where applicable.

Originally designed for on-premises IT service management, the Service Design Workshop integrates hybrid and cloud-native solutions with CapEx vs. OpEx considerations. Its scope has expanded to include optimization strategies for virtualization, ransomware protection, and AI-driven insights, reflecting the ever-changing IT landscape.

NetApp IT’s journey is a model for organizations looking to modernize their infrastructure. By following a structured approach, IT teams can accelerate deployments, improve operational efficiency, and enhance service delivery with predictable performance and costs.

We reinforce the importance of taking a step-by-step approach to modernization. Organizations don’t have to overhaul everything at once. Start with understanding your environment and gathering good performance data. From there, all other improvements become achievable.

Participants in the NetApp Service Design Workshop have found significant value in its structured approach, gaining insights into best practices and identifying opportunities for improvement.

David Tanigawa, NetApp Senior Storage Engineer, shared that the workshop provided a clear framework for assessing their environment. “It was helpful for us to work through the framework the Design Workshop established, taking a detailed look at our environment and how we stack up against other customers in terms of best practices and maturity.”

He also highlighted the support received during the assessment, noting that “as things were brought up, the Service Design Workshop was good at connecting us with PS specialists in various areas and other product teams to dive deeper into different discussions where we had concerns or questions.” The process, he added, helped uncover gaps and areas for improvement, some of which are already being addressed.

Faisal Salam, NetApp Senior Storage Engineer, found the discussion on performance tiers particularly valuable. “I especially liked the part where the workshop told us about the performance tiers—the way we currently do QoS and what enhancements we could probably make to those several volumes that require more performance headroom than we currently offer.”

The Service Design Workshop offers a structured and proven methodology for modernizing IT operations. By leveraging NetApp’s expertise, enterprises can achieve predictable storage costs, reliable performance, and the agility needed to thrive in today’s competitive landscape.

For more information or to schedule a Service Design Workshop, contact your local NetApp representative or visit NetApp.