V-Series Strikes a Chord With Customers, Said NetApp

NetApp announced that despite the difficult economy, revenue for its V-Series product line grew more than 100% year over year during its four fiscal quarters that ended on July 31, 2009. V-Series is a family of open storage controllers that unify NetApp and non-NetApp storage under a common architecture for multiprotocol services. V-Series products are now deployed with more than 3,000 non-NetApp storage systems, enabling customers to achieve greater storage efficiency, reduce costs, and improve data protection with their existing storage.

  Sunrise Senior Living recently purchased NetApp V-Series to improve its disaster recovery site. Sunrise also deployed a NetApp FAS storage system for its main data center. Years of rapid growth left Sunrise with an inefficient, expensive infrastructure that suffered from low utilization, high energy and facilities costs, and nonfunctioning backup schemes that left critical data at risk. Although the organization invested in its infrastructure, it could not meet the expanding needs.

With the help of a NetApp value-added reseller, IronBrick LLC, Sunrise will consolidate its servers with VMware and its storage with NetApp. The V-Series will enable Sunrise to also virtualize third-party storage at the company’s disaster recovery site, protecting its original investment and considerably reducing the backup and recovery window with NetApp Snapshot and SnapMirror technologies. Sunrise expects to reduce Citrix data by 85% with NetApp deduplication on storage not from NetApp. With NetApp V-Series and storage-based data replication, the company estimates it will see considerable savings on licensing fees for capacity-based data replication over three years. The infrastructure improvements have provided a savings amounting to approximately $2 million with additional savings projected for the future.

"With NetApp, we are aiming to increase speed and efficiency and bring costs under control," said Rosemary Theurer, senior vice president for Technology at Sunrise Senior Living. "But the best part about our new solution is that it’s not entirely new. We were able to complement existing investments in non-NetApp infrastructure, which was significantly cheaper than rebuilding from the ground up."

NetApp V-Series enables customers to take full advantage of the benefits of the powerful features of Data ONTAP, such as deduplication, thin provisioning, and Snapshot technology, to improve storage efficiency and drastically simplify data management. NetApp deduplication is one of the fastest-growing technologies in the company’s history, with more than 37,000 systems deployed across all tiers of data, including primary, backup, and archival. With the V-Series, NetApp guarantees that customers will decrease their non-NetApp primary storage capacity for virtual server environments by 35% using NetApp V-Series and deduplication technology.

"V-Series gives customers greater flexibility and efficiency with their existing third-party storage," said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Solutions Marketing at NetApp. "Limited budgets are requiring customers to get more out of the storage they already own. With our storage efficiency technology, customers get back raw capacity and significantly reduce the rate at which storage grows, and that’s a compelling proposition regardless of what storage you own."