NetApp announced that Anaplan, provider of a market-leading platform for business planning and decision-making, has selected NetApp as its primary storage vendor. By adopting NetApp unified data storage to refresh the storage systems in four data centers around the globe, Anaplan is consolidating the storage of its public and private cloud deployments, vastly simplifying its data operations and enabling innovation for its AI-focused solutions.

Anaplan empowers organizations across industries to see, plan, and lead better business outcomes through its cloud-based SaaS platform built with AI. Anaplan customers can use its AI-powered platform to speed up decision-making processes while producing better outcomes such as increasing revenue, improving sales, and enhancing forecasts. To ensure it can reliably and effectively deploy its SaaS platform globally, Anaplan uses a mix of cloud providers and on-premises systems. Before selecting NetApp, Anaplan had to juggle multiple storage platforms, making it slower and more resource intensive to run the data operations it needed to generate powerful AI-driven insights for customers at scale. As Anaplan investigated how to update its aging storage infrastructure, it decided to consolidate its cloud and on-premises operations on intelligent data infrastructure with NetApp which exceeds the performance, cost, replication, and availability requirements Anaplan needs to innovate with AI.

"At Anaplan, we are infusing AI at every level of our platform so our customers can make better plans and meet business objectives," said Adam Thier, Chief Product & Technology Officer at Anaplan. "Previously, our on-premises and cloud data ran on different platforms, at least doubling the amount of work needed to fuel our AI data pipelines. By switching to a single, unified data storage approach for on-premises and cloud, we can ensure that all the modifications and settings we use for our data management apply across our entire environment. In short, NetApp allows us to do more with less."

Anaplan will use NetApp AFF C-Series storage systems to provide the capacity it needs to reliably and efficiently deliver its SaaS application for customers and drive cost savings by tiering secondary data workloads to NetApp FAS storage arrays. To further drive efficiency in its data operations Anaplan is using native cloud storage services from public cloud providers that are built on NetApp ONTAP®, enabling its IT team to easily manage data across the hybrid multicloud, a fundamental need to accelerate data pipeline for AI. NetApp MetroCluster configurations will also ensure high-availability and protection for Anaplan's data operations by enabling snapshot copies for backups and disaster recovery. All of this work simplifies data operations for Anaplan allowing its tech team to focus on more difficult, high-value initiatives such as experimenting with AI.

"NetApp is uniquely qualified to support AI operations for Anaplan. AI runs on data, and data runs on NetApp," said César Cernuda, President at NetApp. "NetApp provides comprehensive unified data storage that connects any data type, any workload, and any storage protocol, anywhere our customers' data is. NetApp's close relationships with all three of the largest cloud service providers empower Anaplan's developers and customers to have an unparalleled hybrid cloud data management solution that is critical to develop AI capabilities in a secure and responsible way. Intelligent data infrastructure from NetApp enables Anaplan to power its AI data operations and meet the high standards its customers expect."