NetApp Customers Accelerate Adoption of 10GbE for Storage

NetApp announced the accelerated adoption of 10-Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) storage connectivity by customers who want to optimize their virtual environments and improve power efficiencies in the data center. Since launching 10GbE in 2006, NetApp has shipped more than 3,000 array ports. In fact, 54% of this total was delivered in 2008 alone, exemplifying the technology’s growing popularity and NetApp’s continued leadership in Ethernet storage.

10GbE is enabling customers to deploy server and storage virtualization more effectively, as well as reduce power, cooling, and space by improving network throughput. As the first storage vendor to support file and block data across Ethernet, NetApp continues to enable multiprotocol data access and emerging standards. This capability is delivered from a single, unified storage system architecture for added customer flexibility.

Sentara Healthcare, a not-for-profit healthcare provider serving more than two million Virginia and North Carolina residents, is a NetApp customer that has leveraged 10GbE to help reduce its data center footprint and power consumption. With 10GbE, Sentara was able to deploy approximately 480 virtual servers on just 16 physical servers without the need for additional infrastructure. By implementing 10GbE rather than a bonded 1-Gigabit infrastructure, Sentara was able to save nearly $700,000 in IT costs.

Sentara Princess Anne

Sentara realizes additional savings when it provisions a new server. Since the 10GbE infrastructure is already built, Sentara doesn’t need to increase port capacities to handle the new server load.

"The decision to incorporate 10-Gigabit Ethernet technology into Sentara’s data center has paid huge dividends for us," said Joseph Rowell, manager of Enterprise Architect Solutions at Sentara Healthcare. "It’s been a tremendous catalyst in allowing us to virtualize our IT environment and has really enabled great efficiencies throughout the data center that previously wouldn’t have been possible. One of the reasons we chose NetApp(R) storage solutions over competing products is because we could more effectively consolidate our storage and network with NetApp’s unified storage architecture
," continues Rowell. "The ability to support both block and file protocols natively across the same controller enabled us to deploy a tiered storage solution and achieve lower TCO."

"With virtualization becoming more prevalent in the data center, 10-Gigabit Ethernet plays a key role in enabling customers to realize the full benefits of their virtualized environments," said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Solutions Marketing for NetApp. "More and more customers are choosing to consolidate their server and storage networking onto 10-Gigabit Ethernet, which provides significant cost savings, and simplifies their data center environments. NetApp will continue to aggressively innovate in providing market-leading 10-Gigabit Ethernet storage solutions to meet this growing demand."

10GbE serves an array of applications, including server fan-in and consolidation, application development, e-mail messaging, databases, multimedia, mirroring, and disaster recovery, and is the basis for future I/O consolidation in the data center to unify physical infrastructures.