SUNNYVALE, Calif.—June 20, 2012—Global business faces a new era in which agility in IT is central to success, today and in the future. Competition, an always-on global economy, and the urgency to make data a propellant for advantage all require the CIO to provide the business with an infrastructure agile enough to cope with a very dynamic business environment. Customers want to accelerate their business with greater efficiency and productivity, but they must think differently to remove the complexity, cost, and inefficiencies of decade-old IT approaches.
Today, businesses can make agility in IT a reality. NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP), in collaboration with its partners, is introducing a new way for customers to fundamentally architect and manage their data storage infrastructure differently to be more agile. Building on years of storage efficiency and clustering innovation, new platform features, products, and technologies with the latest release of Data ONTAP® software, enable IT to better respond to changing business requirements, maintain nondisruptive operations, and grow the business without limits.
Agile Data Infrastructure Makes IT Intelligent, Immortal, and Infinite
The latest release of NetApp® Data ONTAP, the industry's largest installed storage operating system, is another milestone in an aggressive innovation agenda that is the basis for delivering new approaches to managing data for business impact. Today, NetApp is transforming data storage again with agile data infrastructure. Organizations can change the economics of IT and adapt to unpredictable data growth and dynamic business requirements with a single infrastructure that evolves as their business grows and service levels change over time. By combining rich data management with the architectural advantages of clustering, customers can make IT intelligent, immortal, and infinite.
Intelligent Data Management: Data storage can be intelligent and self-aware to deliver an immediate response to numerous rapidly changing business requirements.
- Service Automation and Analytics: Self-managed storage seamlessly scales capacity, not people, with end-to-end visibility into storage infrastructure with functions to control, automate, and analyze data.
- Storage Efficiency: Cost containment in an era of monumental growth means storage efficiency is not a feature but is instead mandatory to exploit every possible opportunity to drive down costs while maintaining or boosting IT performance.
- Virtual Storage Tiering: Always-on application availability requires data-driven real-time responsiveness. Data storage needs to be optimized for agility, low cost, and maximum efficiency. A self-managing data-driven service layer allows a mixed-media storage pool to keep “hot” data on flash drives and less-active data on SATA drives. Fully automated with Flash Pools, the intelligence is built into Data ONTAP, making it efficient for multiple and diverse workloads without requiring complex data classification.
Immortal Operations: Data needs a lifespan that stretches beyond the individual components of the infrastructure to deliver nondisruptive operations and maintain data accessibility 24/7.
- Nondisruptive Operations: NetApp delivers a storage environment with always-on availability. Zero downtimemeans that business-critical applications such as Microsoft® Exchange, SharePoint®, and SQL Server®, as well as solutions from Oracle®, SAP AG, and Red Hat®, running on VMware® vSphere™ or Citrix XenServer® don't go offline for routine upgrades and maintenance, add-ons, and even complete hardware refreshes.
- Embedded Data Security: Businesses must enable appropriate access to critical data; securing both data and equipment involves multiple protection points. Multilevel security prevents unauthorized access to data and helps meet stringent regulatory requirements for data at rest.
- Integrated Data Protection: “Set it and forget it” data protection improves operational efficiency by removing human error and the need for ongoing adjustments to architecture, storage systems, and protection policies in order to meet service-level agreements.
Infinite Scalability: Customers can grow their business knowing that their storage performance, capacity, and