NetApp Offers 50% Guarantee Program Not Only for VMware

As customers look to reduce costs amid the current economic climate, NetApp is extending its 50% Virtualization Guarantee Program, previously available only for VMware, to Citrix and Microsoft virtual environments. As part of the program, NetApp is offering a guarantee that customers will use 50% less storage with NetApp compared to traditional storage in Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V virtual environments. According to industry estimates, most storage that IT organizations purchase is inefficient and underutilized. The NetApp guarantee minimizes investment costs and risks while enabling customers to achieve greater storage utilization in their virtual server and desktop environments.

“Recently introduced guarantee programs vary widely in what is covered and what is guaranteed. Careful evaluation and judgment is needed, but when users qualify and find that the solutions meet their requirements, they should consider these guarantees a plus in the vendor’s favor,” said April Adams, research director, Gartner, in the November 2008 report, Capacity Savings and Storage Utilization Guarantees: What’s Included, and Are They Worth Considering? Adams also said, “During the research phase of your next storage purchasing cycle, ask each vendor if it offers a capacity savings or utilization guarantee.”

NetApp’s unique program assures customers that they will use less storage, achieve better data protection, and increase flexibility when they select NetApp and leverage its unique storage-efficiency technologies such as thin provisioning, deduplication, RAID-DP, and Snapshot, all of which come standard on NetApp systems. No other large storage vendor is willing or able to match this guarantee. As a result, customers can buy less storage and reduce their overall power, space, and cooling costs in their data centers.

NetApp customer Transplace provides comprehensive transportation and logistics management services and technology to major shippers. Transplace trusted NetApp to support its virtualization environment. Transplace achieved as much as 93% space savings leveraging NetApp storage-efficiency technologies such as deduplication. The use of deduplication in all of its virtual environments has enabled Transplace to achieve massive space savings of more than 11TB.

"We’re responsible for the global logistics for many Fortune 1000 companies. The more efficient we can make our processes and infrastructure, the more we can directly impact our ability to execute and respond to the needs of our customers," said Vincent Biddlecombe, CTO of Transplace. "We needed a solution that gave us better business continuity and greater flexibility in our test and development environment. We rearchitected our entire data center infrastructure, making NetApp storage over Ethernet our new standard. This solution has since allowed us to increase customer service levels while simultaneously meeting our own tight budget constraints. The bottom line was that NetApp saved us a ton of money and improved our ability to offer enhanced services to our customers."

NetApp is committed to helping customers drive cost inefficiencies out of their data centers. With the proven expertise and technology that may provide customers to use 50% less storage compared to other competitive offerings, NetApp is helping customers tap into the unrealized potential of their virtual infrastructures.

“Virtualization is at the heart of helping our customers reduce costs and adapt to changing business needs,” said Frank Artale, vice president of Business Development, Citrix Systems. “NetApp extends the value of virtualization by delivering greater efficiency in the storage infrastructure, a requirement for any virtual environment. NetApp’s guarantee gives customers confidence that they can realize greater efficiencies in their XenServer virtual environments and be more flexible and responsive to business change.”

“Applying virtualization technologies broadly across the IT infrastructure, such as those offered by Microsoft for addressing the needs of the desktop through the data center, yields important benefits in reducing costs and attaining greater efficiency, flexibility, continuity, and agility,” said Zane Adam, senior director, Virtualization at Microsoft. “With the combination of the storage capabilities from NetApp and server virtualization offerings from Microsoft, customers can quickly provision both their storage and servers. Together, NetApp and Microsoft deliver greater IT efficiencies with improved flexibility, helping drive down cost and complexity for customers’ operations.”

Availability and Requirements
Customers anywhere in the world who purchase a new system for their virtual desktop and server environment, including Citrix XenServer, VMware ESX, and Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V, can take advantage of this program. If customers don’t use 50% less storage with NetApp compared to competitive storage systems after following established best practices implemented by NetApp Professional Services and utilizing NetApp Data ONTAP storage-efficiency technologies, NetApp will provide the additional capacity needed to meet customers’ shortfall, up to 50% of the original capacity purchased, at no additional charge. Qualifying service delivery is available from NetApp Global Services or participating Authorized Professional Service Partners in networked storage for virtualized platforms.