NetApp ushers in new era, delivers cloud infrastructure for enterprise

To empower customers who are rapidly changing the way their data centres are designed and shifting to a model of IT delivered as a service (ITaaS), NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) today unveiled Data ONTAP 8, along with other new technologies and solutions that will serve as the cloud infrastructure foundation for today and tomorrow.

“Today's announcements truly usher in a new era and way of doing business for NetApp,” said Tom Georgens, president and chief executive officer, NetApp. “Customer dynamics are changing in the face of increased economic pressures as IT executives are tasked with doing more with less. As a result, the makeup of the data centre is drastically changing as companies choose to take advantage of applications, infrastructure, and platforms delivered in the form of services. NetApp is primed to take advantage of this major shift in the market by providing enterprises with not only the industry-leading storage and data management solutions that are ideal for the cloud, but, more importantly, also serve as the technology partner of choice to guide enterprises on their journey in deploying a cloud infrastructure.”

Enterprise customers, global systems integrators, and service providers are already leveraging existing Data ONTAP platforms as the foundation for a wide range of their internal and external cloud deployments. Data ONTAP 8 will build upon these proven cloud capabilities with enhanced functionality for virtualised and shared infrastructure environments, including non-disruptive data mobility, dynamic growth through a scale-out architecture, and 64-bit storage aggregates to support multipetabyte deployments. Data ONTAP 8 will also provide customers with improved data management capabilities and tighter integration with data centre orchestration and management systems, enabling the storage, server, networking, and application layers to interface with one another. The Data ONTAP 8 family combines Data ONTAP 7G and Data ONTAP GX under a single code base in a phased approach that will allow customers to leverage the combined scale-up and scale-out capabilities.

With the addition of these new innovative and enhanced capabilities, Data ONTAP 8 provides customers with a platform that meets their stringent cloud requirements and addresses their challenges in deploying a cloud storage infrastructure, including:

* Secure Multi-Tenancy - Customers can deploy a shared, cost-effective infrastructure across separate user groups or enterprise customers with NetApp's proven technology called MultiStore.
* Transparent Data Motion - Customers can achieve non-disruptive data access during mandatory shutdowns or upgrades and respond quickly and transparently within a single-site or across multi-site distributed deployments.
* Service Automation - Customers can leverage a comprehensive set of role-based data management and monitoring tools to meter usage and enable a charge-back model, significantly reducing operational costs and improving service response time.
* Storage Efficiency - Customers can improve ROI for raw storage purchases and reduce data centre space, power, and cooling.
* Integrated Data Protection - Customers can deploy built-in backup/recovery and business continuity capabilities, which are a necessity for shared infrastructures that must always be on.

“While Data ONTAP provides a wide range of enterprises with storage solutions that fuel their cloud infrastructures, Data ONTAP 8 will take it to the next level by providing enhanced scalability, performance, efficiencies, and other features that are key to the cloud,” said Terri McClure, analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “Combine this technology foundation with its impressive line-up of cloud enablement partners and NetApp has clearly strengthened its position as a true cloud storage infrastructure provider.”

The following new NetApp products, solutions, and services address customers' critical cloud requirements for a more efficient and flexible cloud infrastructure:

* NetApp Data Motion - NetApp's new data motion technology allows enterprises to move data non-disruptively across storage systems with zero application downtime. Now customers can eliminate the impact of planned maintenance outages in virtualised multi-tenant environments. NetApp Data Motion is the first solution of its kind in the storage industry and builds upon the NetApp unified storage architecture to greatly enhance availability for both internal and external cloud customers.

* Performance Acceleration Module II - The second-generation Performance Acceleration Module, a family of flash technology-based caching modules, provides an innovative, alternative use of flash/SSD technology rather than using SSDs in disk shelves. Customers can cost-effectively improve performance across a broader set of workloads without straining their existing infrastructure. Tests conducted by NetApp with an Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) workload show that customers can cost-effectively increase I/O throughput by approximately 78% and speed response time by approximately 30%. These gains were achieved using less than 1% more power and no additional rack space. (Link to this report available in August 25 version of press release)

* NetApp Dynamic Data Centre (NDDC) Solution - The NetApp dynamic data centre solution is comprised of three components to provide customers with a proven and tested solution for delivering ITaaS. The first component is a service-oriented infrastructure (SOI) that leverages NetApp's industry-leading storage technologies. This standardised architecture allows customers to consume and deploy storage, network, and compute resources in a repeatable manner to reduce costs and increase service levels. NetApp offers these shared resources through a service catalogue to deliver infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to end-users. A second component includes a service management framework that provides processes and best practices to help manage the infrastructure and reduce fixed costs wherever possible. The last component is a delivery methodology that leverages NetApp Professional Services and NetApp systems integrator partners to deploy ITaaS infrastructures efficiently and with the least risk to customers.

* NetApp Fast-Start Customer Workshop - NetApp now offers two- to four-day consulting workshops to help customers develop their plan to deploy their NetApp dynamic data centre solution. The workshops are designed to quickly evaluate the customer's current business needs, identify the projects necessary to address the needs, and then help the customer execute a plan to achieve maximum agility and data centre cost savings.

In addition to the products, solutions, and services detailed above, NetApp also introduced the DS4243 disk shelf, a versatile SAS/SATA disk subsystem that enables enterprise customers to streamline their data footprint thanks to the subsystem's dense and space-efficient design (24TB in 4U). As a result, enterprise customers with cloud deployments are able to more efficiently use valuable data centre resources.

“T-Systems provides over 170 enterprise customers worldwide with cloud services for key applications like SAP and Microsoft Exchange with our Dynamic Services offering,” said Olaf Heyden, member of the Management Board of T-Systems and chief ICT operations officer. “Together with our technology partners we are able to achieve 90% service infrastructure utilisation, allowing us to pass on both cost savings and higher service levels to our customers. In fact, our customers see up to 30% reduction in cost using Dynamic Services vs in-house hosting. Furthermore, our customers benefit from integrated data protection and secure multi-tenancy while we are able to flexibly scale IT resources up and down in a matter of hours rather than days or weeks. NetApp is an essential component to enabling all of these benefits by regularly and reliably delivering on our specific requirements.”

“More and more enterprises are moving to a virtualised infrastructure in order to take advantage of both the business and IT benefits that it affords, such as increased flexibility, faster responsiveness, and lower costs,” said Manish Goel, executive vice-president of Product Operations for NetApp. “The NetApp Data ONTAP storage platform, thanks to its unique and industry-leading capabilities, has been helping enterprise customers realise their infrastructure goals for several years. However, today's announcement of Data ONTAP 8 builds on this foundation by offering customers the storage solutions and technologies needed for tomorrow's IT as a service environments.”

Discuss this news in the NetApp community, where you can exchange thoughts and ideas on a variety of topics with our community members. Collaborate with our company; engage in conversation with NetApp leaders and employees; and participate in our passion to go further, faster. Join now at www.netapp.com/us/communities.

To learn about how NetApp is working with its partners and customers to enable enterprise cloud computing, please read today's press release or visit the NetApp Cloud Experience.

For more perspective on NetApp's cloud enablement strategy and vision, please visit one of several NetApp blogs, including that of Dave Hitz, NetApp founder and executive vice-president (http://blogs.netapp.com/dave); Jay Kidd, NetApp's chief marketing officer (http://blogs.netapp.com/jay); and the new “Breaking Through the Cloud” NetApp team blog (http://blogs.netapp.com/cloud/).

Also, listen to Val Bercovici, NetApp cloud czar, in a two-part series on iNside NetApp discussing all things cloud, including customer requirements, NetApp's definition, and NetApp's approach to helping customers deploy the cloud.

Please visit NetApp Play-by-Play as Jeff O'Neal, senior director of Data Centre Solutions for NetApp, takes a deeper dive into how NetApp is enabling ITaaS.

For more information on NetApp's vision for enabling the cloud, read the white paper “Storage Infrastructure for Cloud Computing.” The paper describes the key storage infrastructure requirements for enabling a cloud environment.

For more information on how NetApp helps customers deploy a dynamic data centre, read the white paper “Building a Dynamic Data Center.” The paper describes the steps required by customers to begin building a next-generation data centre.

All customer pricing for products described in this release is available from NetApp sales or reseller partners. NetApp Data ONTAP 8, the NetApp Performance Acceleration Module II, and the NetApp DS4243 disk shelf are scheduled to be available in September 2009. NetApp Data Motion is scheduled to be available in early 2010.

NetApp creates innovative storage and data management solutions that help you accelerate business breakthroughs and achieve outstanding cost efficiency. Discover our passion for helping companies around the world go further, faster at www.netapp.com.