Changing business conditions, complex and resource-intensive application workloads, and zero tolerance for downtime translate into an ever-growing demand for more compute resources, often within the same physical data center space. Scale-out using rack-mount server hardware can increase the risk of sprawling single-instance application servers that create more heat and demand more time to manage, provision, and service.

To improve service efficiencies, lower costs, and improve administrative agility, enterprises are rapidly deploying modular and flexible blade server platforms.

Storage solutions from Network Appliance provide a flexible data management and protection infrastructure that supports the rapid provisioning, data availability, and performance requirements of high-density blade server environments. Space-efficient thin provisioning capabilities from NetApp, such as FlexVol® volumes and Snapshot™ copies, provide blade server users the ability to test, develop, and clone blade data and applications quickly and cost effectively.

• Fast and flexible provisioning. NetApp FlexClone™ provides writable point-in-time images of blade data that take seconds to create and restore, without impacting server resources and I/O performance or demanding substantial additional storage.
• Performance and availability. NetApp Snapshot technology allows cost-effective and frequent point-in-time blade data backups. Unlike other snapshot offerings that degrade overall I/O performance up to 60% with every copy, resource-efficient NetApp Snapshot copies provide sustained data availability to blades with no performance impact.
• Increased utilization. NetApp FlexVol volumes aggregate free space and physical disk I/O across all disk drive spindles, enabling fast creation of multiple, high-performance data volumes. FlexVol volumes can be managed and moved independently from the underlying physical storage, are nondisruptive, and can be sized and resized quickly and dynamically.