NetApp Ushers In New Era
Data ONTAP 8 and Other New Technologies and Solutions Provide Customers with Powerful Foundation to Enable IT as a
Service
AUCKLAND, New Zealand – August 25, 2009—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 Peter O’Connor, vice
president and managing director for NetApp Australia and New Zealand. “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 virtualized and shared infrastructure environments,
including nondisruptive 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 nondisruptive 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 lineup of cloud enablement partners and NetApp has clearly strengthened its position as a
true cloud storage infrastructure provider.”
New Products, Solutions, and Services Empower the Cloud
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 nondisruptively across storage
systems with zero application downtime. Now customers can eliminate the impact of planned maintenance outages in
virtualized 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.
NetApp Dynamic Data Centre (NDDC) Solution—The NetApp dynamic data centre solution comprises 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 Board of Management T-Systems
for ICT Operations. “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 virtualized 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 Peter
O’Connor, vice president and managing director for NetApp Australia and New Zealand. “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 cloud 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 the cloud discussion today.
Additional Resources
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 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.
White Papers
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.
ends