NetApp With Agile Data Infrastructure

Global business faces a new era in which agility in IT is central to success, today and in the future. Competition, an always-on global economy, and the urgency to make data a propellant for advantage all require the CIO to provide the business with an infrastructure agile enough to cope with a dynamic business environment. Customers want to accelerate their business with efficiency and productivity, but they must think differently to remove the complexity, cost, and inefficiencies of decade-old IT approaches.

Today, businesses can make agility in IT a reality. NetApp, Inc., in collaboration with its partners, is introducing a new way for customers to fundamentally architect and manage their data storage infrastructure differently to be more agile. Building on years of storage efficiency and clustering innovation, new platform features, products, and technologies with the latest release of Data ONTAP software, enable IT to better respond to changing business requirements, maintain nondisruptive operations, and grow the business without limits.

Agile Data Infrastructure Makes IT
Intelligent, Immortal, and Infinite
The latest release of Data ONTAP is an innovation agenda that is the basis for delivering new approaches to managing data for business impact. NetApp is transforming data storage with agile data infrastructure. Organizations can change the economics of IT and adapt to unpredictable data growth and dynamic business requirements with a single infrastructure that evolves as their business grows and service levels change over time. By combining rich data management with the architectural advantages of clustering, customers can make IT intelligent, immortal, and infinite.

Intelligent Data Management
Data storage can be intelligent and self-aware to deliver a response to numerous rapidly changing business requirements.

• Service Automation and Analytics: Self-managed storagescales capacity, not people, with end-to-end visibility into storage infrastructure with functions to control, automate, and analyze data.
• Storage Efficiency: Cost containment in an era of growth means that storage efficiency is not a feature but is instead mandatory to exploit every possible opportunity to drive down costs while maintaining or boosting IT performance.
• Virtual Storage Tiering: Always-on application availability requires data-driven real-time responsiveness. Data storage needs to be optimized for agility, low cost, and maximum efficiency. A self-managing data-driven service layer allows a mixed-media storage pool to keep hot data on flash drives and less-active data on SATA drives. Automated with Flash Pools, the intelligence is built into Data ONTAP, making it for multiple and diverse workloads without requiring complex data classification.

Immortal Operations
Data needs a lifespan that stretches beyond the individual components of the infrastructure to deliver nondisruptive operations and maintain data accessibility 24/7.

• Nondisruptive Operations: NetApp delivers a storage environment with always-on availability. Zero downtime means that business-critical applications such as Exchange, SharePoint, and SQL Server, as well as solutions from Oracle, SAP AG, and Red Hat, running on VMware vSphere or Citrix XenServer don’t go offline for routine upgrades and maintenance, add-ons, and even complete hardware refreshes.
• Embedded Data Security: Businesses must enable appropriate access to critical data; securing both data and equipment involves multiple protection points. Multilevel security prevents unauthorized access to data and helps meet regulatory requirements for data at rest.
• Integrated Data Protection: ‘Set it and forget it’ data protection improves operational efficiency by removing human error and the need for ongoing adjustments to architecture, storage systems, and protection policies in order to meet service-level agreements.

Infinite Scalability
Customers can grow their business knowing that their storage performance, capacity, and operational scalability will keep pace indefinitely, keeping investments and capabilities on track with their business.

• Scaling: Scaling efficiently means scaling without the need to add more people to manage the environment, sacrifice performance, or sacrifice capacity. Infinite Volume creates a single volume that can scale up to 20PB as a single scalable entity.
• Unified Architecture: One architecture for many diverse workloads gives customers the flexibility to deal with changes in storage requirements. NetApp introduced the unified storage architecture and Data ONTAP that is an unified scale-out platform that delivers rich data management and data protection capabilities with clustering technology. This enables customers to scale out as well as scale up seamlessly across low-end through high-end systems in a single cluster. In addition, for remote offices, Data ONTAP Edge is a data storage system that runs in a virtual machine on the VMware vSphere platform and is designed to complement NetApp FAS and V-Series storage systems, managing the needs of direct-attached storage.
• Secure Multi-tenancy: Secure separation of data in cloud environments takes virtualization to the next level, providing a bridge to cloud computing. Collaboration between NetApp, Cisco, and VMware has resulted in a secure multi-tenancy solution to partition shared IT infrastructures from servers to storage.

Tom Georgens, President and CEO, NetApp, said: "The volume of data and speed of business are forcing CIOs to make critical decisions about their IT infrastructure to better enable their business. Together with our partners, NetApp is at the forefront of enabling IT transformation with Data ONTAP, which now combines the richest and most sophisticated data management platform with the architectural capabilities of clustering."

Jay Kidd, Senior VP of Product Operations, NetApp, said: "Agile data infrastructure is a leap beyond unified that delivers agility far beyond today’s limits and optimizes data management at a scale the industry never dreamed possible. No customer should accept anything less to address the scope, scale, and complexity of business today. Performance and capacity can be scaled by clustering together multiple systems of any size instead of investing in legacy monolithic systems. By breaking down silos of infrastructure that tie applications to specific arrays, storage can become an infrastructure layer enabling non-disruptive operations and continuous data access. Downtime for rolling upgrades or scheduled maintenance is simply no longer required, allowing true agility from IT."

Luke Norris, CEO, PeakColo, said: "Our business is simple: We enable our customers to be successful by helping them achieve new levels of business efficiency and service flexibility, which means that NetApp is an enabler for our business with no exceptions. We need to be much more nimble than our competition and I don’t know any data management software that comes remotely close to what Data ONTAP allows us to achieve. NetApp allowed us to easily scale to manage 300% annual growth. That is true agility."

Keith Ritchie, director, HPC, GX Technology Corp., said: "A truly agile data infrastructure changes the game in our business. Clustering technology allows us to scale performance and management by pooling together multiple diverse workloads, making nondisruptive operations and continuous data access possible. Scheduled downtime is a relic of the past, making our business more agile for the future."

Ananthan Thandri, VP and CIO, Mentor Graphics, said: "Growing market share in a competitive business environment is a challenge we face every day. Combining that reality with compounding data growth and the speed of our global customers makes time to market become very critical. NetApp Data ONTAP provides a unique path forward for our business with the ability to move volumes of data nondisruptively to support extremely data-intensive engineering and development applications."

Steve Duplessie, founder, Enterprise Strategy Group, said: "Business today is putting enormous pressure on IT to respond almost instantly to very challenging demands like never before. The result is an urgency to think differently and better allocate resources – both financial and operational – so that IT can quickly adapt to and drive change – creating value. Organizations will use agile data infrastructure to fundamentally rethink how they architect and manage their data storage and ultimately to advance and accelerate their business objectives."

Giuliano Di Vitantonio, VP of Marketing, Cisco Systems, Inc., said: "As our customers look for ways to better capitalize on new business opportunities and deliver innovative products and services to market ahead of their competitors, they need an agile compute, network and storage data platform. Together with partners like NetApp, we are delivering integrated solutions that reduce infrastructure complexity while increasing their business agility."

Gary Green, VP, Global Strategic Alliances, VMware, Inc., said: "Together with NetApp, we share a vision for delivering business agility to our customers, allowing them to be more responsive to new opportunities while working with our joint channel partners to deliver solutions that are simple, efficient and flexible. NetApp clustering technology with VMware cloud infrastructure creates a compelling and agile data infrastructure that can deliver value quickly, enabling efficient and flexible IT services to drive business growth."

Availability
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. Customer pricing for these solutions is also available from NetApp sales or reseller partners. Data ONTAP 8.1 is GA as of April 19, 2012. Data ONTAP 8.1.1 is available now for ordering. Data ONTAP Edge is available in August, 2012.

Ecosystem of Partners Makes Agile IT a Reality

Bob Schultz, group VP and GM, Enterprise Desktops and Applications, Citrix Systems, Inc., said: "Together with NetApp, we share a vision for delivering the business agility needed for organizations to deliver cloud services and enable mobile work styles that allow employees to be productive wherever they are. We are working together to provide our joint customers enterprise-ready, validated solutions to make IT more agile by delivering desktops as a service that will enable executive mobility, work shifting, and bring-your-own-device initiatives that users demand."

Paul Lidsky, president and CEO, Datalink Corp., said: "Data center agility remains at the forefront of every conversation we have with businesses today. Today’s announcement highlights yet another evolution of NetApp’s ongoing innovation heritage and provides compelling opportunities not only for my business, but more importantly for our mutual customers and their businesses. By coupling our full suite of data center solutions with NetApp innovations, we help our customers gain market share, reduce costs, and adapt to ever-changing market needs."

J.P. Balakrishnan, VP, Cloud and Big Data Practice, Infosys Limited, said: "We see NetApp agile data infrastructure as an enabler for delivering new market products faster and with higher quality. Having delivered over 100 agile development methodology projects, we see agile data infrastructure giving us a strategic advantage. This truly gives us agility that scales."

Rob Flannery, SVP, National Sales, Insight Integrated Systems, said: "We are excited about the NetApp Data ONTAP announcement and are proud to be a clustering enabled partner. Agile data infrastructure enables us to present an advanced solution to our customers and prospects to drive agility and efficiency in today’s ever changing IT infrastructure and align more with the demands of the business."

Ian Carlson, director, Product Marketing, Windows Server and Virtualization, Microsoft Corp., said: "Microsoft private cloud and enterprise applications such as SQL Server and NetApp agile data infrastructure can help enable our mutual customers to bring products and services to market faster and adjust to changing business requirements more quickly."

Gus Robertson, VP, Global Business Development, Red Hat, Inc., said: "Red Hat’s open source solutions provide enterprises with flexibility and agility across physical, virtual, and cloud deployments. NetApp’s vision of providing further agility to data centers aligns closely with the value that Red Hat delivers to enterprises across IT environments. We look for ward to continued collaboration with NetApp to provide extended benefits to our joint customers."

Kevin Ichhpurani, SVP, Ecosystem and Channels, SAP AG, said: "We believe this innovation will bring significant operational agility to SAP landscapes by effectively leveraging the benefits of storage virtualization, storage automation, and management. It will also provide the ability for customers to nondisruptively scale their storage systems as data volumes continue to expand within the enterprise."

Bob Olwig, VP, Corporate Business Development, World Wide Technology, Inc., said: "Agility in IT is top of mind with businesses today, and WWT is excited to partner with NetApp to help enable agile data infrastructure. This approach, along with our ability to deliver and support advanced data center solutions, is directly in line with WWT’s ongoing commitment to help customers utilize cutting-edge technology to meet their business goals and mission needs."