NetApp announced new products and capabilities as part of
the NetApp Manageability Software Family to enable customers to transform their
data center architectures. This announcement was driven by NetApp storage
innovations for virtualized servers that will help customers improve their IT
infrastructure and processes. Enterprise
customers are undergoing data center transformations to enhance IT flexibility
and efficiency as server virtualization moves into broader deployment. To
enable this transformation, NetApp is providing customers a proven storage
platform for virtualized environments to achieve increased service levels,
higher asset utilization, and greater data center power, space, and cooling
efficiencies.
"NetApp will be a major catalyst in enabling customers
to capitalize on the next generation of data center infrastructure," said
Jay Kidd, chief marketing officer at NetApp. "Today we have established a
lead in delivering virtualization solutions and services that help customers
transform their current IT architectures and amplify the impact that IT
operations have on their business. Combining VMware's full data center
virtualization solutions with NetApp's networked storage solutions is
dramatically improving data management and providing customers a path to
creating a transparent infrastructure."
"Our research indicates that IT departments are
continually challenged to do more with less, making it increasingly difficult
to manage infrastructure complexity while at the same time meet service level
agreements and increase staff productivity," said Roger Cox, Research VP,
Gartner. "Customers are looking for an architectural approach that will
deliver near instant response to business unit requests, automate the most
labor intensive tasks, and scale infrastructure transparently over time."
This news further strengthens NetApp's unified data
management platform with the following new innovative software solutions to
drive customers' data center transformation:
- SnapManager for Virtual Infrastructure -- SnapManager for
Virtual Infrastructure enables customers to protect their VMware environments
with automated data protection and recovery of their virtual machines.
SnapManager for Virtual Infrastructure reduces human error and increases server
utilization for application workloads by eliminating the interruptions and
performance impact caused by traditional server-hosted backups and restores.
- SnapManager Compatibility with VMware Virtualization
Software -- All Windows-based SnapManager products are now compatible with
VMware virtualization software, providing customers the ability to manage data
within virtual machines and take full advantage of the application-specific
data management capabilities provided by NetApp's SnapManager products.
Versions are available for Exchange, SQL, SharePoint, and Oracle. By extending
SnapManager capabilities to virtual infrastructures, customers now have common
data management tools for both their virtualized and physical server
environments. These innovative products will also help accelerate deployment of
existing Windows applications into new virtual server environments.
- Provisioning Manager -- Provisioning Manager provides
policy-based automation to speed up existing provisioning processes, improve
capacity utilization, and reduce human error that results in data loss. As a
result, storage administrators can eliminate the complex series of manual steps
normally associated with provisioning storage in both virtual and physical
server environments. This simplifies training for IT staff and liberates these
valuable personnel to work on more strategic IT priorities
"Virtualization is helping thousands of enterprises
reduce complexity and improve management of their data centers," said
Parag Patel, vice president, alliances at VMware. "NetApp's new
SnapManager for Virtual Infrastructure leverages VMware virtualization for
improved management and automation, including virtual machine backup,
restoration, replication, and disaster recovery. Together, VMware and NetApp
are helping customers transform their IT infrastructures and increase
productivity to better respond to their changing business needs."
"VMware and NetApp give us the best of both worlds,
running virtual applications and storing the images of virtual machines on
NetApp hardware," said Ed Grassie, director of Technology and
Infrastructure with BBM Canada, which provides broadcast measurement and
consumer behavior data to Canadian broadcasters, advertisers, and agencies.
"NetApp solutions supply the data storage power while VMware
virtualization software enables us to distribute data and processing the way
that we want. NetApp enables us to protect our data with immediate mirroring to
remote systems to support disaster recovery. This provides extra time so we can
either deliver the data earlier to customers or recover from other issues or
problems along the way."
Significant enhancements to NetApp's Protection Manager
provide seamless protection of virtualized environments. In addition, updates
to NetApp's Data ONTAP operating system extend deduplication benefits to
customers with NetApp V-Series and MultiStore systems. Furthermore, Data ONTAP
SMI-S Agent, which conforms to the SNIA Storage Management Initiative
Specification (SMI-S), is now available to support the entire line of NetApp
FAS systems and NetApp V-Series virtualized storage systems. These enhancements
extend customers' ability to meet increasingly diverse storage and data
management requirements with a single, familiar, easy-to-use data management
platform.
NetApp Improves Storage Efficiency in Virtualized
Environments
NetApp's high-performance storage solutions were
specifically developed to transform data center technology into a competitive
business advantage. As a result, many NetApp customers are realizing
significant storage efficiency savings as part of their data center
transformation. In a recent study by Oliver Wyman, Making Green IT a Reality:
Customer Perspectives on the Impact of Storage Vendor
Decisions on Power, Cooling, & Space in Enterprise Data Centers
(http://www.netapp.com/library/ar/ar1054.pdf), customers using NetApp, EMC
CLARiiON, and HP EVA systems concluded that innovative NetApp technologies such
as deduplication, thin provisioning, RAID-DP(TM), FlexVol(R), and Snapshot(TM)
dramatically reduce the amount of power, cooling, and space needed in their
data centers. Customers found that NetApp requires 50% less raw storage and
rack space and uses 51% less power and heat load per usable terabyte.
"Our biggest challenge was controlling our data growth
while at the same time meeting customer service levels," said Chris Rima,
supervisor, IT Systems, Information Services, with Tucson Electric Power.
"We undertook an ambitious project to virtualize our IT infrastructure and
we needed a storage system that would deliver data protection for our rapidly
growing virtual storage environment. NetApp delivered fast, cost-effective
backup and restore of our virtual machines and enabled us to quadruple our
storage capacity without increasing administrative headcount, saving at least
$2 million over a three to five year period. Most importantly, we have
streamlined operations and significantly improved client satisfaction by
reducing backup and recovery time, reducing time required to provision new servers
or roll back test and development environments, thus shortening lead time for
new applications and improving availability and performance of server-based
applications through the integrated use of NetApp and VMware
technologies."
New Virtualization Professional Services
In addition to the new product news, NetApp announced the
following new virtualization professional services to accelerate customers'
data center transformation:
- Virtualization Assessment -- Provides customers with
guidance on how to start benefiting from a virtualized platform
- Virtualization Architecture Planning -- Helps customers
design the most efficient server and storage infrastructure for their unique
environment and business needs
- Server & Storage Virtualization Services -- Guides
customers as they build the optimal server platform based on VMware virtualization
software and a set of turnkey service offerings
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