Demonstrating continued momentum just six months after announcing its three-year strategic alliance with Microsoft, NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) today announced tight integration with Microsoft technology to enable the growing number of joint customers and service providers to better optimise and evolve their infrastructure while dramatically reducing costs, streamlining management, and increasing business agility.
Customers can now use familiar Microsoft management tools to easily monitor and manage their virtual environments that include NetApp storage and build internal and public clouds. This tight integration between NetApp and Microsoft extends the broad strategic alliance developed to help customers transform their data centres to be more efficient, agile, and dynamic.
“Tight integration with leading partners like NetApp enables our joint customers to better manage their storage and all of their physical and virtual environments in a more cohesive manner using Microsoft's System Centre management technology,” said Garth Fort, general manager, Systems Centre Marketing at Microsoft Corporation. “Together, we are offering customers an optimal solution to manage their virtualised infrastructure by tightly integrating NetApp's storage efficiency technologies with System Centre.”
Building on Microsoft's extensible management framework, NetApp is unveiling a new management pack that enables Microsoft customers to manage NetApp storage efficiency technologies, plus basic self-healing capabilities with Microsoft System Centre Virtual Machine Manager.
NetApp ApplianceWatch PRO 2.1 includes new PRO Tips that provide granular control and include auto remediation for common storage utilisation, replication, and configuration issues that can affect Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). In addition, Microsoft customers can now create automated reports, troubleshoot storage issues, and view mapping of storage to individual VMs via Microsoft System Centre Operations Manager.
To help simplify the creation of self-service portals and automate management for public and private clouds, NetApp has integrated its best-of-breed technologies with Microsoft's Dynamic Datacenter Toolkits (DDTKs). Through this tight integration, NetApp now offers rapid provisioning and cloning of Windows PowerShell cmdlets for the Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit, which provides a foundation for building private clouds. For the Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit for hosters (DDTK-H), which provides a foundation for building hosted clouds, NetApp can deliver scripts that leverage the new NetApp Windows PowerShell cmdlet library for automated failover and rapid provisioning and cloning. The NetApp Windows PowerShell cmdlet library allows users to easily invoke the capabilities of NetApp storage solutions via Microsoft System Centre, or similar tools.
“As part of our strategic alliance, NetApp and Microsoft continue to deliver on our promise to help customers transform their data centres to achieve greater efficiencies, increase agility, and respond faster to changing business needs,” said Patrick Rogers, vice-president of Products, Alliances, and Solutions Marketing at NetApp. “Our joint vision with Microsoft centres on delivering a unified architecture for customers to design and build highly efficient, virtualised, and dynamic data centres to enable enterprises, integrators and service providers to deliver IT as a service.”
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