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NetApp Deploys Energy-Efficient Data Center Facility in Hillsboro, OR

With 1.5PB of storage, designed in partnership with Digital Realty

On Friday, November 2, NetApp
Inc.
launched a new data center facility in Hillsboro, OR, that play a role in the company’s plans to expand the services it provides
for its more than 12,000 employees and thousands of customers.

The data center is  the hub for all NetApp customer
support monitoring and corporate IT services and leverage the
data infrastructure architecture to deliver nonstop, infinitely
scalable operations. At the heart of this data infrastructure is
NetApp Data ONTAP storage OS. The energy-efficient
data center was designed in partnership with Digital Realty, a
provider of data center solutions.

Like many of its customers, NetApp is faced with a
fast-paced business climate, an explosion in the amount of data that
must be stored and managed, and the need for non-disruptive
operations.


The Hillsboro data center
is a step in a strategy to
transform the IT infrastructure
into a data infrastructure that is:

  • Intelligent. Automatically
    provisions and optimizes storage resources using policy-based
    management.
  • Immortal. Maintains 100%
    accessibility to data despite necessary migrations and upgrades,
    including complete hardware refreshes.
  • Infinite. Scales storage
    resources starting very small and growing to support the data needs
    of the enterprise using a single unified architecture.

Cynthia Stoddard, CIO for NetApp, provides insight into
how Hillsboro’s agile data infrastructure enable business
velocity going forward:

"With the business and
customer landscape changing at a rapid pace, we demand an intelligent
storage architecture that can anticipate and respond to the business
faster. Characteristics such as zero-touch automation, 100%
utilization, end-to-end visibility, and built-in efficiency features
provide us with the ability to quickly respond to change and make
sure we stay in lockstep with our customers’ needs.

"To achieve the growth
objectives we have, we need to enable an environment where the data
is essentially immortal; it is always available – never having to
worry about scheduled downtime or gaps in our ability to support our
customers.

"The environment has to
enable infinite scalability based on the exponential growth of data
and information that we need to store and manage. Our AutoSupport
capability is a prime example as it requires us to analyze a database
that includes more than 24 billion records of our customers’ storage
systems. Clustered Data ONTAP, which represents NetApp’s next
generation of innovation, enables the infinite scalability required
to make sure our customers’ storage systems are operating at maximum
efficiency and performance.
"

Hillsboro’s Data Infrastructure
The data center’s data infrastructure is composed of technologies from NetApp and other NetApp partners,
including:

NetApp FAS6200 storage systems and a joint Cisco and
NetApp FlexPod solution that address the physical and virtual
computing workloads and leverage clustered ONTAP. Approximately 1.5PB
of clustered Data ONTAP storage is deployed in the Hillsboro
data center.

Cisco has partnered with NetApp IT to provide the
unified fabric network based on the Cisco Nexus products and FlexPod,
a solution leveraging the Cisco Unified Computing System combined
with NetApp storage. These two solutions together help form the core
of the Hillsboro data center architecture, enabling NetApp IT to
achieve its scalability, availability, and utilization objectives.

Fujitsu PRIMERGY and SPARC Enterprise servers provide an
ecosystem, based on over 40 years of industry experience and
intellectual property. The servers also excel in energy efficiency,
virtualization features, and system management functions, which
enhance and complement the efficiencies of the NetApp data center
facility.

Energy Efficiency
While many data centers today struggle with energy
waste, this data center’s design supports the company’s goals for
sustainability and data center power reduction. The estimated data
center power usage effectiveness (PUE) will be less than 1.3.

Features include:

  • Use of outside air economizers provides ‘free
    cooling’
    for most of the year.
  • Pressure-controlled cold-aisle containment reduces fan
    energy while eliminating hot air intrusion.
  • Electrical distribution system is optimized using
    transformers and uninterruptible power supply.

"NetApp
asked us to deliver an efficient, cost-effective data center in the
shortest time feasible. The Hillsboro custom designed data center
represents our commitment to meet NetApp’s specific requirements,
utilizing our innovative approach to modular data center engineering,
design and construction,
" said Michael
F. Foust, CEO at Digital Realty. "We are
very pleased this data center will be an important component of
NetApp’s growth strategy and long-term vision to remain one step
ahead of growing business demand.
"

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