SUNNYVALE, Calif., April 24 -- 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 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

·         Read more about the enhanced E-Series platform in the IDC White Paper, sponsored by NetApp, The IT Data Explosion Is Game Changing for Storage Requirements, #234369, April 2012: www.netapp.com/us/library/analyst-reports/ar-idc-data-explosion-game-changing-storage.html

·         Connect with NetApp experts and storage enthusiasts on the NetApp Community:http://communities.netapp.com/community/products_and_solutions/efficient_it

·         Follow NetApp on Twitter: www.twitter.com/NetApp

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·         Connect with NetApp on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/groups?about=&gid=111681 

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Source: NetApp