AUSTRALIA, Sydney - 10 April 2007 -
StoreVault, a NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) division, today announced that
its StoreVault™ S500 has been certified to work with VMware
Infrastructure. Combining StoreVault with VMware Infrastructure 3
provides small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) with
infrastructure virtualisation strategies that better manage storage
and server resources. This announcement further expands the joint
collaboration between VMware and NetApp to provide combined
consolidation solutions for SMB and large enterprise
environments.
Available immediately, the StoreVault S500 helps customers realize
the benefits of combining storage with infrastructure
virtualisation. VMware Infrastructure enables SMB customers to
optimise and manage their IT infrastructure by allowing a single
hardware platform to run multiple virtual machine instances
simultaneously, maximising hardware efficiency. When the StoreVault
S500 is deployed in VMware environments, it can simplify storage
management concerns such as resources, data backup and recovery,
and capacity provisioning.
Data growth challenges are creating tremendous headaches in data
loss, backup, and recovery for SMBs. Part of the problem is that
many SMB IT environments consist of many servers with
direct-attached storage (DAS). As a result, there is an increasing
interest among SMBs to realise the same benefits that enterprise
data centers have but on a smaller scale. Severing the physical
dependencies between servers and storage achieves measurably better
returns on both server and storage resources.
"Virtualisation is useful to businesses of all sizes, not just
Fortune 500 companies," said Brian Byun, vice president of Global
Partners and Solutions at VMware. "SMB IT managers face many of the
same pressures as data centre operators when solving storage and
server management issues while having fewer resources to address
the problems. Certifying StoreVault with VMware provides a great
value proposition to meet the budgetary and reliability needs of
smaller firms."
Ahearn, Jasco + Company, an accounting and financial services firm
based in south Florida, was living with the pains of older
equipment, DAS, and the inability to scale resources every day.
Ahearn, Jasco + Company's infrastructure consisted of multiple
servers running separate applications for more than 35 employees.
Many of their servers were legacy systems using DAS that were
performance-bound by their disks, which, in many cases, consisted
of single drives without RAID. As a result, performance was slow
while data redundancy and fault tolerance were major
concerns.
"Many SMBs similar to Ahearn, Jasco + Company are realising that
DAS is inefficient, painful to grow, and unable to meet growing
storage performance demands," said Audrey Levi, president of Altek
Computer Group, a value-added reseller (VAR) based in Miami. "So
there was a good opportunity to help Ahearn, Jasco + Company
revolutionise their server and storage environment and boost
performance by virtualizing their resources or, in other words,
creating a centralised storage pool that can be accessed by virtual
machines."
With tax season quickly approaching, Ahearn, Jasco + Company had to
address its need for increased storage. In the past, this meant
adding storage to individual systems in chunks, which led to some
servers being underutilised. Ahearn, Jasco + Company decided that
adding more DAS was not a viable option due to the low
price-performance ratio, high expense, and, most importantly,
downtime and disruption to employees during the important tax
season.
"We desperately needed to upgrade our entire IT infrastructure on a
limited budget," said Dave DePillis, IT manager of Ahearn, Jasco +
Company. "It became almost impossible to completely understand the
storage sprawl happening in our environment. What we needed was a
unified view of all of our resources to improve server and storage
allocation. Backup was another big concern since we relied on tape
devices that were painfully slow and didn't guarantee disaster
recovery-something that needed to be fixed with hurricane season
coming."
The StoreVault S500 provided Ahearn, Jasco + Company with an
enterprise-proven storage technology platform from NetApp that was
affordable and easy to use. The StoreVault S500 allows storage to
be added or allocated on-the-fly without disruption to operations.
In addition, the StoreVault S500 enables faster backup and recovery
for a higher degree of data reliability. With a single purchase,
Ahearn, Jasco + Company gained greater flexibility to grow and
respond to future data storage needs without additional
investment.
Just as StoreVault simplifies the storage environment, VMware
Infrastructure does the same for optimising the use of hardware
assets and creating a solution that allows new server, application,
and storage capacity to be provided at a moment's notice. VMware
Infrastructure has been deployed by more than 20,000 enterprise
customers on industry-standard servers available from leading
server vendors. SMBs such as Ahearn, Jasco + Company are marrying
blade servers running VMware Infrastructure to StoreVault storage
systems for greater reliability, flexibility, and affordability.
Multiple VMware virtual machines run on a consolidated hardware
platform and access dedicated storage on StoreVault. The StoreVault
S500 meets all storage needs for any new or existing workloads and
VMware Infrastructure allows entire virtual machines to be backed
up, moved, and replicated with zero downtime. In addition, Ahearn,
Jasco + Company reduced rack space, lowered energy costs, and
created a far more flexible environment, while improving data
reliability rates and disaster recovery times have also been
greatly improved.
"We completely modernised our server and storage environment while
meeting our budget requirements," said DePillis. "The combination
of StoreVault and VMware Infrastructure provided us a complementary
technology solution that solved our business problems. We now have
a network storage infrastructure that will last three to five years
with the exciting prospect of future scalability at a cost that is
next to nothing. StoreVault and VMware Infrastructure provided a
powerful formula to improve our storage and server utilisation and
manage our capacity for future investment. Nothing like this was
available from my traditional storage and server vendors. Also, the
StoreVault Advanced Protection Architecture and RAID-DP™
provided enterprise-class security and data protection
functionality at a price that fit our budget."
"We're seeing an interesting trend among SMBs that are looking for
smarter, more reliable alternatives to the traditional way of
handling storage-and iSCSI SAN and infrastructure virtualisation
are getting a lot of attention," said Sajai Krishnan, general
manager of StoreVault. "Our strategic relationship with VMware is
designed to bring added value to IT generalists within SMBs that
are tasked with taming storage and infrastructure management with a
limited budget. Ahearn, Jasco + Company is a great example of one
way VMware Infrastructure can be brought into play for SMBs with
our StoreVault storage platform."
Price and Availability
Pricing is available directly from StoreVault VARs.
About StoreVault
StoreVault, a NetApp division, is focused on delivering data
storage solutions tailored to the needs of small and medium-sized
businesses. StoreVault combines enterprise-proven technology from
Network Appliance, a world leader in unified storage solutions for
today's data-intensive enterprise, with the scalability,
simplicity, security, and affordability required by SMBs.
Information about StoreVault solutions and resellers is available
at
www.storevault.com..
About Network Appliance
Network Appliance is a world leader in unified storage solutions
for today's data-intensive enterprise. Since its inception in 1992,
Network Appliance has delivered technology, product, and partner
firsts to simplify data management. Information about Network
Appliance™ solutions and services is available at
www.netapp.com/au/.
VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in
the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and
names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective
companies.
NetApp is a registered trademark and Network Appliance, StoreVault,
and RAID-DP are trademarks of Network Appliance, Inc. in the U.S.
and other countries. All other brands or products are trademarks or
registered trademarks of their respective holders and should be
treated as such.
Press Contacts:
Mark Heers
Director Marketing and Alliance
Network Appliance
Tel: +61 2 9979 5623
mheers@netapp.com
Rachel York
Max Australia
Tel: +61 2 9954 3492
Rachel.york@maxaustralia.com.au