SCIENCE

Tier 3 announced it is a Gold-level member in the NetApp Partner Program for Service Providers. Long coupled with flexible and efficient NetApp storage and data management solutions, Tier 3's agile, self-optimizing enterprise cloud platform helps enterprises confidently run mission-critical, production applications in the cloud.

Tier 3 first architected its enterprise cloud platform to include NetApp as part of its infrastructure in 2007, immediately reducing backup on an entire data center from 24 hours to one hour and cutting time to restore customer data from 3.5 days to under an hour. Now an official Gold-level member of the new Partner Program for Service Providers, Tier 3 will receive additional storage expertise, resources and best practices from NetApp that will enable the company to continue to meet the unique performance, implementation and disaster recovery needs of enterprise cloud-based applications and services.

"Our mission is to provide our customers with an enterprise-grade cloud platform with the SLAs, security and built-in disaster recovery they require," said Adam Wray, chief executive officer, Tier 3. "From the get-go, the secure multi-tenant architecture we built leveraging NetApp's storage and data management solutions have been a key enabling factor in delivering that experience to our customers over and over again. We trust that the greater level of collaboration and support we'll receive as a Gold level preferred partner will help us better serve enterprises in the cloud so they can continue to focus on their core business."

"Our partner ecosystem is critical to helping enterprises increase efficiency and flexibility in their IT infrastructure, especially vital as more and more of these companies look to offer their applications and services in the cloud," said Todd Palmer, vice president of Americas Channels at NetApp. "Partners such as Tier 3 play an important role in bringing these secure, multi-tenant public cloud offerings to market and helping enterprises make critical infrastructure decisions to accelerate their businesses."
The key benefits Tier 3 has discovered by building its secure, multi-tenant enterprise cloud platform on top of building NetApp's storage and data management solution include:

•     High Performance: With its own unique technologies that can optimize storage performance of the NetApp offerings, Tier 3 is delivering cloud performance that approaches that of on-premises SANs scaling into the 100,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS) range to meet enterprise storage demands.
•     Smarter storage. Leveraging NetApp technology, Tier 3 allows customers to spin up fully redundant virtual SANs as if they have their own dedicated SAN in the cloud. Virtual SANs provide 99.999 percent uptime without the need for dedicated drives or management. Tier 3 supports Microsoft and Linux clustering and CIFS, NFS and iSCSI mounts. Its virtual SANs provide easy deployment, full redundancy and superior performance that scale automatically in real time through its intelligent predictive technology.
•     Business Continuity: Enterprise customers benefit from business continuity built in as a standard feature of every deployment on a Tier 3 cloud platform. Tier 3 also leverages NetApp technology as part of its unique built-in client backup and virtual drive features.