NetApp Announced Tight Integration With Microsoft

Demonstrating continued momentum just six months after announcing its three-year strategic alliance with Microsoft Corp., NetApp, Inc. announced tight integration with Microsoft technology to enable the growing number of joint customers and service providers to better optimize and evolve their infrastructure while dramatically reducing costs, streamlining management, and increasing business agility. Customers can now use familiar Microsoft management tools to monitor and manage their virtual environments that include NetApp storage and build internal and public clouds. This tight integration between NetApp and Microsoft extends the broad strategic alliance developed to help customers transform their data centers to be more efficient, agile, and dynamic.

"Tight integration with leading partners like NetApp enables our joint customers to better manage their storage and all of their physical and virtual environments in a more cohesive manner using Microsoft’s System Center management technology," said Garth Fort, general manager, Systems Center Marketing at Microsoft Corporation. "Together, we are offering customers an optimal solution to manage their virtualized infrastructure by tightly integrating NetApp’s storage efficiency technologies with System Center."

Building on Microsoft’s extensible management framework, NetApp is unveiling a new management pack that enables Microsoft customers to manage NetApp storage efficiency technologies, plus basic self-healing capabilities with Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager. NetApp ApplianceWatch PRO 2.1 includes new PRO Tips that provide granular control and include auto remediation for common storage utilization, replication, and configuration issues that can affect Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). In addition, Microsoft customers can now create automated reports, troubleshoot storage issues, and view mapping of storage to individual VMs via Microsoft System Center Operations Manager.

Companies of all sizes are benefiting from the powerful combination of NetApp and Microsoft technologies. For example, WhiteWater West is achieving significant efficiencies through streamlined monitoring and management, while Avanade is successfully transforming its IT environment.

"WhiteWater West manages our virtual environment, which includes NetApp storage, using Microsoft System Center Operations Manager. We spend about 10 minutes each month – just enough time to log in, check reports, and log out – and have set up centralized reporting using ApplianceWatch PRO to trend our storage utilization and deduplication savings," said Dan Morris, senior systems engineer at WhiteWater West. "We’re saving more than 3 terabytes, or 50%, and we store more than 6 terabytes of data on a NetApp system, which has physically less than 4 terabytes of disk storage. The space we’ve saved through NetApp deduplication alone will support one year’s data growth with enough capacity left over to integrate one of our international offices into our Microsoft Exchange system."

"Avanade runs more than 500 virtual machines across our production, test, and development environments using Hyper-V and NetApp storage, along with integrated management through Microsoft System Center," said Patrick Cimprich, vice president and chief architect at Avanade. "In April, we launched an automated self-service portal that enables users to request and immediately receive virtual machines for up to three weeks. So far the results are impressive, with virtual environments provisioned within minutes instead of days. In fact, we’re already seeing significant time-to-market gains and estimate we’ll save more than 1,000 IT hours by the end of the year."

To help simplify the creation of self-service portals and automate management for public and private clouds, NetApp has integrated its best-of-breed technologies with Microsoft’s Dynamic Datacenter Toolkits (DDTKs). Through this tight integration, NetApp now offers rapid provisioning and cloning of Windows PowerShell cmdlets for the Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit, which provides a foundation for building private clouds. For the Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit for hosters (DDTK-H), which provides a foundation for building hosted clouds, NetApp can deliver scripts that leverage the new NetApp Windows PowerShell cmdlet library for automated failover and rapid provisioning and cloning. The NetApp Windows PowerShell cmdlet library allows users to easily invoke the capabilities of NetApp storage solutions via Microsoft System Center, or similar tools.

"As part of our strategic alliance, NetApp and Microsoft continue to deliver on our promise to help customers transform their data centers to achieve greater efficiencies, increase agility, and respond faster to changing business needs," said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Products, Alliances, and Solutions Marketing at NetApp. "Our joint vision with Microsoft centers on delivering a unified architecture for customers to design and build highly efficient, virtualized, and dynamic data centers to enable enterprises, integrators and service providers to deliver IT as a service."