Integration of NetApp With Microsoft Toolkit for Hosters

NetApp, Inc. announced enhanced integration with Microsoft Corp. to deliver enterprise-class data protection solutions to cloud service providers by leveraging the Microsoft Dynamic Data Center Toolkit for Hosters.

Although enterprise-class data protection has historically been too expensive for most small- and medium-size businesses (SMBs) to implement themselves, NetApp and Microsoft now enable service providers to offer enterprise-class data protection to their SMB customers. Additionally, NetApp announced the availability of new professional service offerings and additional resources and guidance for service providers to build a variety of enterprise-class cloud services.

"SMB customers have many of the same disaster recovery and business continuity requirements as large enterprise organizations, but often times don’t have the necessary skill set or budget needed to achieve the desired results," said Laura DuBois, program vice president, Storage Software and Solutions, IDC. "Solutions that address this gap by providing enterprise-level data protection along with the support and guidance needed to deploy will be integral in helping SMBs realize the true benefits of a cloud infrastructure."

The Dynamic Data Center Toolkit provides sample code and guidance for building cloud services powered by Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V and the Microsoft System Center Suite. NetApp is currently the only storage vendor to integrate seamlessly with the Dynamic Data Center Toolkit, enabling service providers to leverage NetApp’s industry-leading integrated data protection capabilities such as disaster recovery, clustered failover, and backup and recovery. These solutions enable service providers to expand their service offerings to accelerate their business, while offering and meeting stringent service-level agreements (SLAs) for their customers. Additionally, NetApp storage efficiency capabilities help service providers reduce their costs – savings that are passed along to SMBs.

"SMBs are demanding enterprise-class disaster recovery solutions, and hosting service providers are in a tremendous position to fill that demand as more SMBs move toward hosted IT services," said John Zanni, general manager of Worldwide Hosting for the Communications Sector at Microsoft. "We’re pleased to be working with NetApp as part of the Dynamic Data Center Alliance to enable hosting service providers to offer these disaster recovery solutions, and to take another step to move beyond commoditized hosting services to become full-service IT providers to their customers."

nGenX Corporation, a regional infrastructure-as-a-service provider and joint NetApp and Microsoft customer, leveraged the Dynamic Data Center Toolkit to deliver its Guardian GeoCloud service to its customers. The Guardian GeoCloud solution, which replicates a customer’s data to geo-diverse locations and automates failover in the event of a disaster, demands a shared storage solution that meets the highest availability requirements. nGenX leverages NetApp storage solutions for its Hyper-V based cloud services to provide its customers with the security of knowing that their data is safe and that they will experience minimal to no impact to their critical applications, even in the unlikely event of a complete data center failure. Service providers such as nGenX can now take advantage of the efficiencies inherent in the NetApp and Microsoft solution to make these types of robust services available to smaller enterprises through the cloud at an affordable price.

"The Microsoft Dynamic Data Center Toolkit allowed us to leverage NetApp technologies, which are a fundamental building block of our Guardian GeoCloud solution, to deliver a unique service and set ourselves apart in the marketplace," said Robert A. Bye, executive vice president at nGenX. "Using NetApp storage efficiency technologies such as thin provisioning and deduplication in Microsoft Hyper-V environments helps us maximize infrastructure utilization and lower costs for the end user. As a result, we use 50%-60% less storage than we would otherwise need to support cloud services for our customers. We are really exploding some myths about the affordability of enterprise-class disaster recovery for our customers."

"Today’s announcement extends our already strong relationship with Microsoft to deliver integrated solutions for cloud service providers," said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Solutions and Alliances Marketing, NetApp. "To date, small- and medium-size businesses haven’t been able to make the investments necessary to enjoy the benefits of robust disk-based data protection. Working with Microsoft, we are helping to address this gap by arming regional and local service providers with the ability to deliver cost-effective enterprise-class data protection services to their customers."

Additional Professional Services
and Solutions for Service Providers
To supplement this announcement, NetApp also unveiled new consulting offerings and design guidance documentation for Microsoft environments, along with new capabilities to help service providers improve their SLAs.

To help service providers reduce the risk and complexity of deploying a NetApp and Microsoft solution on their own, NetApp introduced new professional services specifically designed for Microsoft environments. The new offerings assist service providers across all phases of a shared infrastructure deployment, including assessment, planning, architectural design, and best-practices-based implementation. Delivered by an expert consulting team and based on a proven service methodology, these new offerings support services built using the Dynamic Data Center Toolkit integrations to provide NetApp storage and data protection for Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, and Microsoft SharePoint® infrastructures.

NetApp has also published new design guidance documentation to give service providers best practices around rapidly and efficiently deploying as-a-service offerings for their customers. The guidance helps service providers design and deploy the following cost-effective enterprise-class services:

• Exchange as a service
• SharePoint as a service
• Infrastructure as a service
• Storage as a service
• Desktop as a service

Finally, to provide further assistance to service providers deploying NetApp data protection as a service (DPaaS), NetApp has partnered with InControl Software to help service providers monitor and meet their customers’ SLAs. InControl software can be deployed in a NetApp DPaaS environment to provide real-time SLA and key performance indicator monitoring. This data informs administrators of upcoming SLA issues as they happen, helping service providers manage SLAs proactively rather than reactively, to increase customer satisfaction and improve business processes.

All customer pricing for offerings described in this release, except for the professional services, is available from NetApp sales and reseller partners. Pricing for the professional service offerings is available from NetApp sales only. All offerings are available today.