NetApp Upgrades

[This press release was under embargo until tomorrow November 9, at 6.01 AM in Europe. We always respect embargoes but this time, it was not respected by NetApp itself! All the new models and Data ONTAP 8.0.1 were cited on its own web site in Israel at least one day before the announcement. This press and our comments were prepared to be published tomorrow. So we did it now.] Editor

[Update: about two hours after the publication of this article on tis web site, the page on the NetApp’s Israeli web site has been updated, now without the list of all new models and the reference to Data ONTAP 8.0.1.]
Editor

More customers are rethinking their IT infrastructures and evaluating alternatives to cope with the new realities of today’s business growth and pace. There is a sense of urgency to act now and move from a siloed infrastructure to a shared IT infrastructure that is more efficient and flexible in addressing today’s rapidly evolving business requirements. To help customers respond to these demands, NetApp unveiled new platform features, products, and technologies that will help customers make the transition to a flexible and efficient shared IT infrastructure-the foundation for cloud computing-and enable IT to be an accelerator of the business.

"There’s a significant change underway as CIOs look to better align IT to the speed of business and get IT budgets under control," said Andreas König, senior vice president and general manager EMEA, NetApp. "This is a pivotal time, because the decisions IT leaders make will not only impact how they compete today but also the long-term success of their businesses. Winners in this market are thinking and choosing differently, and more customers are turning to NetApp as their storage platform to achieve greater flexibility and efficiency. We are paving the way for customers to transition to a shared IT infrastructure that will help them be ready for the future and use IT as a tool to capitalize on new growth opportunities."

NetApp’s milestones in storage

• 1993 NAS appliance and snapshot
• 1996 Multiprotocol appliance
• 2001 Near-line (ATA) storage appliance
• 2001 Unified NAS/SAN appliance
• 2003 iSCSI storage system
• 2004 RAID-DP
• 2005 Thin provisioning and virtual cloning
• 2006 Unified application integration
• 2007 De-dupe
• 2008 FCE storage system
• 2009 Unified tier-less storage
• 2010 Shared IT infrastructure

The following new product and technology portfolio delivers the storage platform for customers to build their shared IT infrastructure and make IT more flexible and efficient.

Unified Architecture and Systems Portfolio

• NetApp Data ONTAP 8: Data ONTAP 8 has new features to enable greater flexibility, efficiency, scalability, and performance. A first for the industry, Unified Connect takes the unified architecture to new levels by supporting all protocols through a single wire to help increase efficiency, improve performance, and simplify management. NetApp DataMotion for Volumes allows customers to move large volumes of data without disrupting their business operations. In addition, new inline data compression can be used alone or with deduplication to help dramatically reduce the amount of storage needed and improve storage efficiency.
• NetApp FAS/V6200 Series: A family of three new high-end storage systems-FAS/V6280, FAS/V6240, and FAS/V6210-extends NetApp’s unified architecture and provides double the performance, increased enterprise-class availability, and more scalability and flexibility. Customers can meet their mission-critical business requirements while responding to the rapid growth and pace of their business.
• NetApp FAS/V3200 Series: A family of three new midrange storage systems-FAS/V3270, FAS/V3240, and FAS/V3210-delivers most cost-effective platform for greater flexibility and efficiency, higher performance, and enterprise availability, to support today’s midrange storage requirements and adapt to future changes.
• NetApp Solid State Drives (SSDs): In addition to its market-leading Flash Cache technology, the introduction of SSDs extends NetApp’s portfolio to provide an option for customers who require consistently fast response times for mission-critical applications. The new SSDs deliver high input/output operations per second and the flexibility to use them for SAN or NAS without needing a gateway or different storage system.
• NetApp SAS Disk Shelf: NetApp’s third-generation SAS-based shelf, the new DS2246, helps double the performance density, can provide up to 50% better power efficiency per rack unit, and offers strong resiliency and availability for enterprise storage needs.

The New Line of NetApp Storage Subsystems

OnCommand Management Software Suite
NetApp’s new management suite, OnCommand, allows greater control and optimization of unified storage, automation for operational efficiency, and optimal flexibility with an open API that integrates with a variety of third-party management products and hypervisors.

FlexPod Modular Data Center Solution
As part of their ongoing collaboration, Cisco, NetApp, and VMware are offering a presized, validated, standardized data center architecture design that is available through select joint channel partners. FlexPod for VMware helps customers accelerate their transformation to a virtualized, shared IT infrastructure with consistent and proven designs to simplify deployment and help reduce risk.

In addition to the new product portfolio detailed above, NetApp introduced a simpler software pricing structure to make it easier for customers and partners to do business with NetApp. The new software pricing structure offers more value-added software for no additional cost as part of the base package, enhancing value and increasing flexibility for customers customizing their infrastructure.

Manish Goel, executive vice president of Product Operations, NetApp, said: "Yesterday’s technology strategies and approaches are inadequate for today’s requirements. The market is moving toward a more flexible and efficient shared IT infrastructure, which is optimal for virtualization and cloud computing. Customers no longer ask if they need to move to this paradigm, they now ask when and how. And the answer is now and with NetApp. We were early to recognize this trend and are uniquely positioned to help customers successfully transition to a shared IT infrastructure, enabling them to make decisions today that will impact the long-term success of their business."

Eddy Navarro, computer systems manager for Storage, JCVI, said: "The science of genomics deals with staggering amounts of data and, on average, the amount of data we must store doubles every year. New sequencing technologies could increase our storage requirements by an order of magnitude. Our NetApp storage infrastructure helps us ensure our scientists have the data they need. Even when the amount of data grows exponentially, we can count on NetApp to deliver flexible, efficient storage, so that we can make the most of the dollars we get from our grants. This means JCVI can continue to lead efforts to conquer disease and improve the environment through genomics research."

Mark Peters, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), said: "Facing the dual challenges of flat IT budgets and exploding data growth, IT organizations need to keep pace with the business requirements of today yet also be ready to adapt and respond to the demands of tomorrow. The resulting urgency to employ more dynamic, flexible, and efficient IT approaches-including various cloud implementations-is being enabled by many new technologies that have matured, including those that NetApp is announcing here. These can be used to create a genuine shared IT infrastructure that combines the best of traditional and cloud approaches in order to allow organizations to seize new opportunities and ultimately to advance and accelerate their business objectives."

Sean Kerins, president, North America, for Arrow Electronics Inc.’s Enterprise Computing Solutions (ECS) Segment, said: "Arrow ECS applauds NetApp’s initiative to increase efficiency and flexibility for resellers seeking to support the evolving IT needs of their customers. We look forward to connecting our resellers to new solutions that are leading the industry in helping customers build a storage foundation now and for the future."

Kia Behnia, chief technology officer, BMC Software, said: "The benefits of cloud computing are well documented, but they can only be reached with a comprehensive management strategy that reduces risk and drives compliance. BMC and NetApp integrated solutions provide customers with the benefit of a fully automated and flexible end-to-end shared IT cloud infrastructure, beginning with the initial service request to provisioning, deployment, management and decommissioning."

Chuck Robbins, senior vice president, US Enterprise, Commercial and Canada for Cisco, said: "Cisco, NetApp and VMware developed FlexPod design architecture to help our customers easily move to a simplified, unified, virtualized infrastructure. The validated and predefined architecture makes it easy for our mutual customers and channel partners to implement a flexible, virtualized shared IT infrastructure built on the unified compute, fabric and storage center module."  

Frank Artale, vice president, Business Development at Citrix, said: "Citrix and NetApp share a vision of providing flexible IT infrastructures that allow customers to quickly realize the business benefits of virtual computing, and giving them the ability to capitalize on new opportunities and innovate to get out in front of the competition. Combining Citrix virtualization solutions with Flexible IT from NetApp enables our joint customers to build simpler and more cost-effective IT environments to enable virtual work styles for users and virtual data centers for IT."

Paul Lidsky, president and CEO, Datalink, said: "Data center agility, efficiency, and flexibility continue to be at the forefront of every conversation we have with businesses across the country. Leveraging innovative technologies is pivotal to this strategy. Today’s announcement highlights yet another evolution of NetApp’s market-leading technology and provides compelling advantages for our customers. We are excited to offer NetApp innovations to help our customers gain market share, reduce costs, and adapt to ever-changing business needs."

Robert Ross, chief security officer and senior vice president of Network and Technical Services, DCI, said: "We support hundreds of community banks, all of which have different needs and evolving service requirements. As our customers grow, we need to be able to scale services and capacity in step with demand. Our shared IT infrastructure from NetApp gives us the flexibility to provide services to our customers on demand and address their shifting business needs. By providing flexible, efficient services, we’re helping our customers be competitive while accelerating our own success."

Ryan McDonald, IT director, eLynx Technologies, said: "NetApp is the backbone of eLynx’s shared IT infrastructure, enabling us to consolidate systems on a single platform while managing multiple workloads and protocols without hindering performance. Data ONTAP 8 provides the flexibility and scalability essential to helping us handle our growth by supporting large aggregates for greater performance and increased efficiency. Further, NetApp’s strong ecosystem of solution partners, such as Cisco and VMware, delivers flexible IT to help us meet demand and accelerate our business."

Kazuhiro Igarashi, president of Storage Systems Unit, Fujitsu Limited, said: "As an advocate of dynamic infrastructures that make it easier and more cost effective for organizations to respond quickly to constantly changing business conditions, Fujitsu applauds NetApp’s commitment to flexible IT. As a Global System Partner in NetApp’s broad partner ecosystem, we look forward to providing our customers with greater flexibility through our joint solutions."

Amy Rao, founder and CEO, Integrated Archive Systems, said: "NetApp’s announcement solidifies its industry leadership for providing the most efficient and cost-effective solutions that enable a flexible, shared IT infrastructure to meet customers’ business demands. Leveraging NetApp’s unique capabilities, Integrated Archive Systems is excited to be among the first to evangelize and provide solutions that help customers drive greater flexibility and efficiencies in their data center."

Stephen Boyle, group vice president, Worldwide Strategic Alliances, Oracle, said: "Flexible IT from NetApp and Oracle enables IT teams to provide affordable, always-ready services at the speed of today’s business. NetApp’s new scalable platform and software enhancements, coupled with Oracle software can help improve flexibility, efficiency and performance of database environments, and help our customers’ transition to cloud environments."

Robert Fuller, vice president Channel Sales, Rackspace, said: "In the past, meeting computing needs meant you had to buy servers, hire technical talent and continually reinvest to keep up with technology. As the leader in the IT hosting and cloud computing industry, Rackspace can combine its hosting solutions with the flexibility and efficiency of NetApp products and services to provide a more secure, cost effective and reliable approach to computing."

Stacy Hayes, vice president of Strategic Alliances, Terremark, said: "As a NetApp Service Provider Partner, we leverage NetApp’s flexible and efficient platform and technologies to help us deliver unique, innovative cloud services that are tailored to our customers’ individual business requirements. By helping our customers achieve greater flexibility and efficiency within their IT, we enable them to accelerate the success of their business."  

Gary Green, vice president, Global Strategic Alliances, VMware, said: "Virtualization and shared storage are critical to enabling a shared IT infrastructure, which offers organizations greater flexibility and efficiency to quickly keep pace with the evolving demands on their businesses. To help our customers move further faster, VMware has collaborated with Cisco and NetApp to develop FlexPod, which can significantly reduce risk and simplify deployment with proven, validated ‘out-of-the-box’ designs. With FlexPod, our joint customers can expedite their transition to IT as a Service with a standardized platform from three industry leaders."

The NetApp products and technologies can be ordered through NetApp or NetApp’s worldwide network of value-added authorized solution providers, distributors and systems integrators.