Network Appliance adds new products and capabilities to NetApp Manageability Software family
Network Appliance has announced new products and capabilities as part of the NetApp Manageability Software family to enable customers to transform their data centre architectures.
This announcement is driven by NetApp storage innovations for virtual servers that will help customers improve their IT infrastructure and processes.
Enterprise customers are undergoing significant data centre transformations to enhance IT flexibility and efficiency as server virtualisation moves into broader deployment.
To enable this transformation, NetApp is providing customers a proven storage platform for virtualised environments to achieve increased service levels, high asset utilisation, and greater data centre power, space, and cooling efficiencies.
"NetApp will be a major catalyst in enabling customers to capitalise on the next generation of data centre infrastructure," said Jay Kidd, chief marketing officer at NetApp.
"Today we have established a lead in delivering virtualisation solutions and services that help customers transform their current IT architectures and amplify the impact that IT operations have on their business.
“The combination of server virtualisation technologies from VMware, Microsoft, Oracle, and Citrix 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 labour intensive tasks, and scale infrastructure transparently over time."
This news further strengthens NetApp's unified data management platform with the following new software solutions to drive customers' data centre 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 dramatically reduces human error and increases server utilisation for application workloads by eliminating the interruptions and performance impact caused by traditional server-hosted backups and restores. As a result, customers can protect their data more reliably.
SnapManager Compatibility with VMware- All Windows-based SnapManager products are now VMware compatible, 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 virtualised 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 utilisation, 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.
"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 behaviour data to Canadian broadcasters, advertisers, and agencies.
"NetApp solutions supply the data storage power while VMware 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 virtualised environments. In addition, updates to NetApp's Data ONTAP operating system add expanded support for multivendor virtualisation and 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 virtualised 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 virtualised environments
NetApp's high-performance storage solutions were specifically developed to transform data centre technology into a competitive business advantage.
As a result, many NetApp customers are realising significant storage efficiency savings as part of their data centre 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 centre, customers using NetApp, EMC CLARiiON, and HP EVA systems concluded that innovative NetApp technologies such as deduplication, thin provisioning, RAID-DP, FlexVol, and Snapshot dramatically reduce the amount of power, cooling, and space needed in their data centres.
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 virtualise 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 US$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 virtualisation professional services
NetApp has also announced the following new virtualisation professional services to accelerate customers' data centre transformation:
Virtualisation Assessment- Provides customers with guidance on how to start benefiting from a virtualised platform
Virtualisation Architecture Planning- Helps customers design the efficient server and storage infrastructure for their environment and business needs
Server & Storage Virtualisation Services- Guides customers as they build the optimal server platform based on VMware technology and a set of turnkey service offerings
NetApp Authorised Professional Service Partner Program
NetApp is also strengthening its commitment to help channel partners provide high levels of quality and consistency with a new Authorised Professional Service Partner Program.
With this program, partners now have the ability to sell and deliver their own brand of professional services for NetApp solutions utilising NetApp best practices, tools and methodologies, comprehensive training, and implementation backup support.
Partners in this program will be positioned to serve as trusted advisors for a complete solution set and to deliver maximum value to NetApp customers.
13-Feb-2008