SUNNYVALE, Calif.-April 24,
2012-The sheer volume of data and information produced by
big data and high-performance applications continues to grow at
explosive rates. How organizations store, manage, analyze, and
protect this data can mean the difference between forging ahead and
falling behind. As a result, the decision an organization makes
about the storage platform or solution that serves as the
foundation for its IT infrastructure is as critical as ever.
NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) today announced several
major enhancements to its NetApp® E-Series platform to help
its ecosystem of OEM partners more effectively serve their
customers' growing big data requirements and also serve as the
platform for many of NetApp's own big data solutions. The new
features, which are available in the latest version of NetApp
SANtricity® software, the storage management software for the
E-Series platform, include improved data protection, performance,
and management capabilities. With the enhanced platform, OEMs have
a storage foundation they can build on with confidence to deliver
their own unique and innovative storage solutions to address their
customers' high-performance needs and continue to grow their own
business. Furthermore, these enhancements strengthen NetApp's
position as an innovation leader and expand on the platform's
already industry-leading combination of price, performance, and
density.
Thanks to the added flexibility these new
features deliver, OEMs can also leverage the E-Series platform to
address other environments, such as virtualized infrastructures and
Microsoft® applications, providing them with the versatility
to serve additional customer segments to help further expand their
business opportunities.
E-Series Platform Provides
High-Performance Storage Building Block
New features in the enhanced E-Series
platform include:
- Dynamic Disk Pools (DDP) is an innovative new technology that
provides customers with enhanced data protection and improves
overall performance. DDP administers dynamic reconstructions of
failed drives, providing customers with the ability to restore a
storage system to optimal conditions following a drive failure
eight times faster than with traditional RAID architectures. DDP
can also reduce the impact on the performance customers experience
while restoring from a drive failure by nearly 60%. This enhanced
data protection technology enables big data customers to maintain
business continuity and reduce overall storage system costs.
- Additional data protection capabilities are provided by
enhanced NetApp SANtricity Snapshot™ technology that enables
customers to schedule more frequent and flexible Snapshot copies,
helping to improve overall recovery point objective (RPO) and
recovery time objective (RTO) performance. The improved RPO and RTO
performance increases data availability and reduces the amount of
time and money an organization needs to allocate to recover
valuable information.
- VMware® vStorage APIs for Array Integration is now
available across the E-Series platform. This provides customers
with tighter integration between the storage array and VMware tools
to help manage their storage environments. The added integration
offers customers in virtualized environments increased flexibility,
more efficient use of server resources, and increased performance
and scalability.
- Thin-provisioning capabilities enable organizations to enhance
overall efficiency by increasing storage utilization and reducing
administrative costs.
- Active-active LUN ownership enables customers to standardize
and simplify system configurations since LUN ownership to each
controller does not have to be performed manually. This feature
also balances the load automatically across both controllers, which
helps optimize performance.
Supporting Quotes
- Jeff Barber, vice president and business line
executive, IBM Mid-Range/Low-End Disk
"IBM continues to enjoy a successful OEM relationship with NetApp,
delivering leading products like the IBM DS3500 for entry-level
storage, the IBM DCS3700 targeted to high- performance computing
customers, and the recently announced N3220 and N3240 for the NAS
market. IBM and NetApp are delivering on our mutual roadmap to
enhance and grow these OEM-based offerings and continue to serve
these markets."
- Jose Reinoso, vice president of Storage Engineering,
SGI
"As drive sizes grow, our customers rely on SGI to stay ahead of
the curve with storage technology to ensure the highest level of
data integrity. By incorporating NetApp's DDP as an option into the
SGI® InfiniteStorage™ 5500 and 5000 platforms, customers
are able to leverage protection and utilization advantages over
traditional RAID architectures, effectively making storage worry
free."
- Frank Schmitz, Chief of Supercomputing Department at
ZIB (Konrad Zuse Center for Information Technology -
Berlin, www.zib.de)
"The availability of the ZIB data is of extreme importance for the
users and for us and we have been actively evaluating technologies
to reduce the window of vulnerability that exists due to the
lengthening re-build times of ever-increasing disk drive
capacities. We look forward to the Dynamic Disk Pooling technology
giving us the tools to dramatically reduce these re-build times and
deliver the research and results that our scientists depend on. And
the performance under drive failure afforded by the Dynamic Disk
Pooling technology is an extra benefit."
- Ben Woo, program vice president of Worldwide Storage
Systems, IDC
"The latest enhancements to the NetApp E-Series platform strengthen
what was already a very successful and powerful storage platform
for OEMs. By incorporating technologies such as Dynamic Disk
Pooling into the platform, NetApp is providing its OEM partners
with a foundation they can build on to deliver innovative storage
solutions across many different customer segments while meeting a
wide variety of use cases and applications."
- Joel Reich, vice president of the Array Products Group,
NetApp
"In less than a year the NetApp E-Series platform has experienced
tremendous momentum and adoption among our OEMs, and today's
announcement will only further strengthen that momentum. The latest
enhancements to the E-Series build on what is already an
industry-leading platform and provide innovative technologies that
address real customer challenges across big data markets. NetApp is
committed to helping drive our OEM partners' success, and the
NetApp E-Series platform is the high-performance storage building
block that makes that possible."
Additional Resources
About NetApp
NetApp creates innovative storage and data management solutions
that accelerate business breakthroughs and deliver outstanding cost
efficiency. Discover NetApp's passion for helping companies around
the world go further, faster at www.netapp.com.
Press Contact:
Ryan Lowry
NetApp
(408) 822-7544
ryan.lowry@netapp.com
NetApp, the NetApp logo, Go further,
faster, SANtricity, and Snapshot are trademarks or registered
trademarks of NetApp, Inc. in the United States and/or other
countries. VMware is a registered trademark of VMware, Inc.
Microsoft is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation. All
other brands or products are trademarks or registered trademarks of
their respective holders and should be treated as such. Use of the
term "partner" or "partnered" does not imply a legal partnership
between NetApp and any other company.