NetApp extends enterprise application development and test solutions to multivendor SAN storage environments
NetApp helps Mine Safety Appliance and Bosch and Siemens accelerate application deployment, reduce risk, and lower cost
SUNNYVALE, Calif. - September 23,
2008 - NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) today announced availability
of enterprise application development and test solutions for
heterogeneous SAN storage environments. Now customers can use
NetApp® storage solutions with multivendor SAN storage to
accelerate the development process for enterprise applications that
support their business. Customers can preserve investments in
legacy production storage yet respond faster to changing business
needs by reducing time to deployment of new ERP, CRM, or decision
support functionalities by as much as 50%.
Traditional approaches for application
development require customers to create full physical clones or
copies of production data that require 100% storage capacity
overhead. Normally, a minimum of three to four of these
non-production copies are needed to enable enterprise application
development, test and quality assurance teams. Larger enterprises
can generate 20 or more nonproduction copies per application in
their development and test environments. This data proliferation
often causes storage, power, and physical space costs to skyrocket.
More importantly, cloning and test environment preparation can take
days or weeks of IT staff time and hamper development team
productivity. The right storage strategy can not only reduce
overall data requirements, but also enhance both IT and development
team productivity. The end result is faster time to application
deployment with higher quality and lower cost.
Mine Safety Appliances (MSA), a leading
manufacturer of sophisticated safety products, faced a challenge in
streamlining its development and test processes to enhance the
quality of business applications and speed deployment. With NetApp,
MSA was able to make a quantum leap in the efficiency of its
development and test processes related to maintaining SAP®
solutions.
"With our old processes, it used to take two
days to copy a database and set up a test environment. Using
instant cloning from NetApp, it now takes about 20 minutes. As a
result, our ability to verify patches and transports for SAP
solutions has greatly increased. In addition, testing new
functionality and new features is far easier and faster because we
no longer have to wait another two days to copy our system in the
test environment," said Scott McCullough, manager of Technical
Operations, MSA. "With NetApp, we can make as many database clones
as we need to work on application development projects in parallel,
not serially. This lets us increase our responsiveness to the
business, accelerate time to deployment of new SAP functionality,
and assure the quality of the finished code."
Now customers running enterprise applications
in production SAN environments can keep their EMC, HP, or Hitachi
Data Systems (HDS) production storage in place and accelerate their
development and test processes with NetApp solutions. NetApp
integrated solutions for enterprise application development and
test include SnapMirror® for Open Systems (previously named
ReplicatorX™), which allows IT operations teams to easily
replicate data from any storage, over any distance, to a lower cost
NetApp array. Once the data is on NetApp, application and IT
operations teams can use NetApp functionality to:
- Respond faster to changing business needs while minimizing
disruptions
- Trim months from deployment times for new application
functionalities
- Reduce development and test storage requirements by up to
90%
- Save space, power, and administrative overhead costs
- Enable parallel development test workflows to enhance quality
and reduce risk
Bosch and Siemens Home Appliances (BSH)
Group, one of the world's leading domestic appliances
manufacturers, deployed a NetApp development and test solution for
use with SAP applications while continuing to use HDS storage in
production. Within BSH's SAP solution-based manufacturing
landscape, multiterabyte production systems were copied on a
regular basis to a set of quality assurance, test, and repair
systems. This was done using physical copies, which took hours or
days and required a lot of manual tasks. Each copy occupied the
same amount of storage as production data, which required excessive
storage resources.
"We were attracted to the potential speed and
cost savings of a NetApp solution, but we weren't ready to change
out our HDS production storage. NetApp helped us create a
heterogeneous solution to replicate databases to NetApp," said
Harald Geringer, head of Corporate DataCenter at BSH, Giengen,
Germany. "Once the data was on NetApp, we used storage-efficient
FlexClone® capabilities to provide instant copies for our
application teams. This created a huge improvement in productivity
as our teams can now get copies of multiterabyte databases for
test, quality assurance, and repair in minutes instead of hours or
days. And we reduced the total amount of storage used for these
processes by 65% to 80% using virtual copies. In addition, we run
the standby database for disaster recovery and then make copies for
development and testing without interrupting the mirror. As a
result, we are getting the most out of our NetApp investment by
combining disaster recovery and development and test processes on
the same infrastructure."
"Application owners are hungry for ways to
more quickly assimilate new business requirements into enterprise
applications but are hamstrung by legacy processes that are both
time and resource inefficient," said Patrick Rogers, vice president
of Solutions Marketing at NetApp. "NetApp can provide customers a
more efficient solution for maintaining and customizing their
business-critical enterprise applications while allowing them to
keep their tuned production storage in place if they so desire. Our
application development and test solutions are proven to help
customers accelerate time to deployment of enterprise application
upgrades and customizations, improve overall quality, and
dramatically reduce infrastructure and administrative cost. And,
with virtual servers increasingly becoming standard in development
and test infrastructures, we offer further value by providing the
industry's most efficient and rapid protection and provisioning of
virtual machine images. NetApp and virtual server technology
together are a powerful formula for further streamlining the
application development process."
For more information about NetApp application
development and test solutions, visit www.netapp.com. Also, visit NetApp
TechTalk online events at
http://communicate.netapp.com/forms/verify?seminarID=20080923POD
for a podcast with Tom Shields, senior manager, Solutions Marketing
at NetApp, as he discusses how the right storage strategy can bring
greater speed, quality, and cost efficiency to your application
development and test process.
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Pricing and
Availability
Customer pricing for products described in this press release is
available from NetApp sales or reseller partners. All products are
available immediately.
About NetApp
NetApp creates innovative storage and data management solutions
that accelerate business breakthroughs and deliver outstanding cost
efficiency. Discover our passion for helping companies around the
world go further, faster at www.netapp.com.
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Statements
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Press Contact:
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NetApp
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E-mail: rogerv@netapp.com