Storage

January 24, 2005
NetApp makes storage virtualization practical

NEW DELHI AND UNITED STATES -- Network Appliance Inc. (NetApp) recently achieved a critical milestone in expanding and delivering its storage grid vision by shipping the latest version of its powerful enterprise storage software - Data ONTAP 7G. It is available immediately on all NetApp storage systems. NetApp also released the gFiler storage appliance.

Patrick Rogers, vice president, marketing, said Data ONTAP 7G established NetApp's clear leadership in storage grid, besides making storage virtualization practical. According to him, it was the first flexible virtualized storage. Along with the gFiler, it brought the customers closer to utility storage, lowered the TCO and enabled higher RoI.

The new Data ONTAP 7G software provides the world's first dynamic virtualization engine, capable of aggregating physical storage components into intelligent, self-optimizing capacity pools, while enabling data management functions to be precisely tailored to individual application datasets. Customers using Data ONTAP 7G and its advanced virtualization capabilities can double their storage utilization, dramatically increase I/O performance for enterprise-class applications, and significantly reduce storage management costs for multi-application environments.

Data ONTAP 7G delivers these benefits by pooling storage resources with built-in logic that automatically manages fine-grained data, and enables administrators to shrink or expand volumes to accommodate storage demand changes on the fly. Whereas other solutions require heavy administrator intervention to allocate storage and are static in nature, Data ONTAP 7G automatically handles allocations and utilization and can absorb additional storage resources dynamically with no human intervention. The net effects include lower storage management costs and significant time saving, as storage is intelligently configured and reconfigured non-disruptively, even during production hours.

It makes data cloning for test, development, and simulation instantaneous and 'storage frugal', further helping with storage utilization and providing significant benefits for customers and applications that require lots of intensive data modeling and manipulation.

To accelerate customer readiness, improve asset utilization, and more efficiently take advantage of the powerful new features in Data ONTAP 7G, NetApp Global Services is launching the immediate availability of ConsultingEdge Data Migration Services for Data ONTAP 7G. By combining exceptional storage expertise and applying best practices, NetApp Global Services assists customers in making a smooth transition to Data ONTAP 7G.

The primary new features of Data ONTAP 7G that bring compelling user benefits to life are FlexVol and FlexClone. FlexVol creates dynamically virtualized, flexible data containers that eliminate performance and utilization tradeoffs, and renders obsolete the notion of storage volumes being statically tied to specific physical or logical disks. FlexVol is the feature of Data ONTAP 7G that provides dynamic virtualization. It enables the precision tailoring of NetApp's advanced data management features, such as Snapshot point-in-time data imaging and SnapMirror replication facilities, to the unique needs of each application data set, while providing the performance of large disk pools to even the smallest data sets.

FlexVol allows for the dynamic and non-disruptive provisioning (growing and/or shrinking) of storage volumes as well, and facilitates a utility storage model based on thin provisioning of capacity. It is complemented by RAID-DP, an earlier NetApp innovation, making large pools of disk drives practical and safeguarding against multidisk failure scenarios, an increasing vulnerability given the large capacities of today's drives.

FlexClone enables the near-instantaneous creation of multiple, independently writable images of FlexVol data sets, with zero storage overhead. Cloned data can be manipulated and tested in a variety of ways without affecting the initial data set; only changes in the clone consume additional storage space. Competitive approaches for cloning data take up the same amount of storage space as the full original data set. FlexClone represents a breakthrough innovation for database applications and modeling.

NetApp also announced the enterprise gFiler storage systems that provide Fiber Channel data access, and fully leverage the new enterprise storage virtualization capabilities in Data ONTAP 7G for multi-vendor storage environments. The gFiler solution has extended its storage systems support to include the HP StorageWorks XP Disk Array family and the IBM TotalStorage DS4000 series (formerly named "FAStT"), complementing the existing support for Hitachi Data Systems, Hitachi Ltd., Sun StorEdge 9900 Disk Array family, and IBM Enterprise Storage Server disk array systems. The gFiler expands the range of applications and user needs it can manage with the industry's most robust, multiprotocol, multivendor, dynamic storage virtualization products.

The gFiler is a special-purpose, highly optimized multiprotocol storage appliance that seamlessly integrates into Fiber Channel SAN fabrics, enabling customers to leverage NetApp high-performance and scalable data management solutions, consolidating disparate DAS, NAS, and SAN islands into a common, open storage pool. In multiprotocol data access, the NetApp gFiler enables affordable, cost-effective storage consolidation; provides data accessibility and recoverability to a broader range of existing and new applications; and helps today's business share its valuable data across wider corporate networks.

Contact:
Network Appliance
www.netapp.com