As a leading NetApp partner, GDT believes in optimizing the data used in an organizations landscape. Data exists in various states — in use (compute), at rest (storage), in motion (network) — and the optimal use of data in every state is essential for companies to conduct their operations. Given the utmost need for the optimal use of data in all states, GDT aims to create solutions that would assist its clients and customers in achieving their goals swiftly and efficiently.
One of the biggest concerns regarding optimal data use is data management. Companies tend to obtain data in multiple forms and from various sources. However, a customer’s data is often underutilized. Furthermore, due to the constant growth of data, data risks becoming stale and occupying extra storage space without adding value to the business. GDT focuses on strategically collaborating with NetApp and other eco system providers to provide its customers with tools and solutions to optimize and access their data, regardless of the state, time, location, or workload. GDT and its partners design a secure, operationally consistent, and financially optimized system that allow clients to meet their business outcomes.
Launched in 1996, GDT uses its years of experience and expertise to combat the challenges encountered in the data management space. The present data and IT landscapes face various obstacles and opportunities, such as cloud migration, manual tasks, lack of normalized data, and constantly changing cybersecurity requirements. In addition to a data centric, consultative approach, GDT also assesses its customer’s environment to design, deploy, and manage their workloads through consultative and professional services.
As an IT services and consultation provider, GDT develops solutions that are both industry standard and custom to meet a customer’s requirements. This allows GDT to cater to clients and across projects. Every business, whether a start-up, medium-sized, or established, wishes to optimize its data usage, adopting cloud-based platforms, and deploying automation while simultaneously ensuring data protection, security, and recoverability. Through its partnership with NetApp, GDT uses a Data Fabric-centered approach that allows its clients to create their own customized data fabric. This data fabric concept allows a customer to deploy and manage their workloads regardless of location with a consistent operating model, security, and financial optimization. GDT develops cost, performance, security, and recoverability strategies to reduce operational costs and support any size workload.
The Dallas, Texas-based company leverages innovative facilities, extends its partnerships to the top OEMs in the industry, and builds a team of IT experts to revolutionize organizational operations. Talking about delivering engineering-driven solutions to customers that evaluate technologies and trends, John Woodall, GDT’s VP Solutions Architecture, said, “We seek to collaborate and co-create with our customers. This collaboration results in a customized technology and services roadmap that allows our customers to leverage our expertise to focus on their transformational priorities.” At GDT, Mr. Woodall leads teams developing complex systems through challenging, demanding, mission-critical, and large-scale environments.
GDT’s consultative approach enables its customers to choose an assessment model based on their requirements. GDT assessments cover workload analysis, security evaluations, and cloud-related assessments. In the case of a phased engagement, GDT incorporates architecture and deployment services to achieve relevant results. Since technical components vary for each customer, GDT focuses on helping customers develop strategies and timelines for their technology investments combined with services. This approach, saving them time and resources to focus on other operational activities.
GTD’s expertise, in collaboration with NetApp, have helped clients overcome challenges in various ways. One example was to enhance a high-tech EDA use case, GDT provided a strategic approach, including NetApp SnapMirror and Cloud Volumes to increase their flexibility with an optimized capability to leverage Public Cloud for burst and ad hoc workloads across multiple Cloud platforms.
In addition to work in EDA spaces, for example, GDT also helped improve an IoT services companies Oracle environment. The US-based company provides as part of their workflow, many high-performance Oracle databases using NetApp for primary storage and optimized backup and recovery. Using GDT, the IoT customer can recover data quickly and leverage copies for testing, QA, Dev, Patch, and ad hoc activities swiftly and conveniently. GDT’s leveraged NetApp SnapShots and SnapVault for fast backup, offsite recovery, and cloning. This design supports the use of a regional hub and spoke design to balance workloads, perform application and/or site level fail over and fail back even during unplanned outages without any downtime.