More customers are rethinking their IT infrastructures and evaluating alternatives to cope with the new realities of today's business growth and pace.
There is a sense of urgency to act now and move from a siloed infrastructure to a shared IT infrastructure that is more efficient and flexible in addressing today's rapidly evolving business requirements.
To help customers respond to these demands, NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) today unveiled new platform features, products, and technologies that will help customers make the transition to a flexible and efficient shared IT infrastructure - the foundation for cloud computing - and enable IT to be an accelerator of the business.
“There's a significant change under way as CIOs look to better align IT to the speed of business and get IT budgets under control,” said Andreas K"onig, Senior Vice-President General Manager EMEA, NetApp. “This is a pivotal time, because the decisions IT leaders make will not only impact how they compete today but also the long-term success of their businesses. Winners in this market are thinking and choosing differently, and more customers are turning to NetApp as their storage platform to achieve greater flexibility and efficiency. We are paving the way for customers to transition to a shared IT infrastructure that will help them be ready for the future and use IT as a tool to capitalise on new growth opportunities.”
The following new product and technology portfolio delivers the storage platform of choice for customers to build their shared IT infrastructure and make IT more flexible and efficient.
Unified architecture and systems portfolio
* NetApp Data ONTAP 8: Data ONTAP 8 has new features to enable greater flexibility, efficiency, scalability, and performance. A first for the industry, Unified Connect takes the unified architecture to new levels by supporting all protocols through a single wire to help increase efficiency, improve performance, and simplify management. NetApp DataMotion for Volumes allows customers to move large volumes of data without disrupting their business operations. In addition, new inline data compression can be used alone or with deduplication to help dramatically reduce the amount of storage needed and improve storage efficiency.
* NetApp FAS/V3200 Series: A family of three new midrange storage systems - FAS/V3270, FAS/V3240, and FAS/V3210-delivers one of the industry's most cost-effective platform for greater flexibility and efficiency, higher performance, and enterprise availability, to support today's midrange storage requirements and adapt to future changes.
* NetApp Solid State Drives (SSDs): In addition to its market-leading Flash Cache technology, the introduction of SSDs extends NetApp's portfolio to provide an option for customers who require consistently fast response times for mission-critical applications. The new SSDs deliver high input/output operations per second and the flexibility to use them for SAN or NAS without needing a gateway or different storage system.
* NetApp SAS Disk Shelf: NetApp's third-generation SAS-based shelf, the new DS2246, helps double the performance density, can provide up to 50% better power efficiency per rack unit, and offers strong resiliency and availability for enterprise storage needs.
OnCommand management software suite
NetApp's new management suite, OnCommand, allows greater control and optimization of unified storage, automation for operational efficiency, and optimal flexibility with an open API that integrates with a variety of third-party management products and hypervisors.
FlexPod Modular Data Centre Solution
As part of their ongoing collaboration, Cisco, NetApp, and VMware are offering a pre-sized, validated, standardised data centre architecture design that is available through select joint channel partners. FlexPod for VMware helps customers accelerate their transformation to a virtualised, shared IT infrastructure with consistent and proven designs to simplify deployment and help reduce risk.
In addition to the new product portfolio detailed above, NetApp introduced a simpler software pricing structure to make it easier for customers and partners to do business with NetApp. The new software pricing structure offers more value-added software for no additional cost as part of the base package, enhancing value and increasing flexibility for customers customising their infrastructure.
Supporting quotes
Mike Styer, Country Manager South Africa, NetApp:
“Yesterday's technology strategies and approaches are inadequate for today's requirements. The market is moving toward a more flexible and efficient shared IT infrastructure, which is optimal for virtualisation and cloud computing. Customers no longer ask if they need to move to this paradigm, they now ask when and how. And the answer is now and with NetApp. We were early to recognise this trend and are uniquely positioned to help customers successfully transition to a shared IT infrastructure, enabling them to make decisions today that will impact the long-term success of their business.”
Tony de Sousa, Business Unit manager, Datacentrix, South Africa:
Our customers are constantly under pressure to reduce costs and respond to the evolving needs of the business in order stay ahead of the pack in our competitive markets. As a Netapp partner, we are able to address these ever changing requirements by offering an optimal storage platform for a flexible and efficient shared infrastructure. NetApp delivers best-of-breed products and technologies that help customers capitalize on new opportunities, get to market faster, and offer better, higher-quality services. Not only does Netapp resolve our customer issues, it gives us the ability to have a competitive edge in our market.
Mark Peters, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG)
“Facing the dual challenges of flat IT budgets and exploding data growth, IT organisations need to keep pace with the business requirements of today yet also be ready to adapt and respond to the demands of tomorrow. The resulting urgency to employ more dynamic, flexible, and efficient IT approaches - including various cloud implementations - is being enabled by many new technologies that have matured, including those that NetApp is announcing here. These can be used to create a genuine shared IT infrastructure that combines the best of traditional and cloud approaches in order to allow organisations to seize new opportunities and ultimately to advance and accelerate their business objectives.”
Availability and pricing
The NetApp products and technologies can be ordered today through NetApp or NetApp's worldwide network of value-added authorized solution providers, distributors and systems integrators. Customer pricing for these solutions is also available from NetApp sales or reseller partners. For more information, visit http://www.netapp.com/us/how-to-buy/.
Additional resources:
* Article “Is Your IT as Flexible as Your Business Needs It to Be?”: http://www.netapp.com/us/company/leadership/flexible-it/flexible-it.html
* NetApp's new storage-buying criteria for shared IT infrastructure: http://media.netapp.com/documents/rfp-exec-summary.pdf
* Manish Goel about flexible IT and why organizations should be thinking about it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_3wikT4ajQ
* Val Bercovici's blog on NetApp's approach to shared IT infrastructure: http://blogs.netapp.com/exposed/
* Vaughn Stewart's blog on how virtualization is driving customer innovation in today's flexible IT infrastructure: http://blogs.netapp.com/virtualstorageguy/
* NetApp on Twitter at http://twitter.com/netapp and www.twitter.com/NetAppCloud
* Discuss this news in the NetApp Community at www.netapp.com/us/communities
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