NetApp Unveils Clustered Data ONTAP Innovations that Pave the Way for Software-Defined Storage

World’s #1 Branded Storage OS* Reduces Downtime and Accelerates Responsiveness to Business Changes

SUNNYVALE, Calif., June 11, 2013 — NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) today announced a new version of its flagship storage operating system – clustered Data ONTAP®. The new software gives organizations and cloud service providers the capability to rapidly and cost effectively deliver new services and capacity with maximum application uptime. Clustered Data ONTAP 8.2 cuts through the performance, availability, and efficiency limits of traditional hardware silos, empowering IT to nondisruptively align the storage infrastructure with changing business and application demands.

Industry leading capabilities in clustered Data ONTAP:

• Nondisruptive operations with greater than five-nines reliability (99.999%), providing continuous data access during scheduled downtime and dynamic load balancing without disruptive data migrations
• Seamless scalability with up to 69PB of storage and 24 controller nodes, 49,000 LUNs, 12,000 NAS volumes supporting over 100,000 clients and single container up to 20 PB
• Proven storage and operational efficiency within a unified and multi-tenant architecture that meets the needs of enterprises, small, and midsized businesses

Additional key features and enhancements:

• Granular quality of service (QoS) to meet application performance service levels in multi-tenant and multi-workload environments for SAN and NAS
• NetApp® SnapVault® disk-to-disk (D2D) backup: compression, and deduplication savings are preserved over the network and restores of PB-scale datasets, applications, and virtual machines (VMs) are instantly available
• Cost-effective and flexible adoption models including single-node and switch-less configurations that enable nondisruptive and on-demand infrastructure scaling
• Storage VMs that support software-defined initiatives and enable agility by delivering storage services from pooled heterogeneous hardware resources
• Enhanced Microsoft virtual environments with built-in support for SMB3.0 and ODX delivering superior management, scalability, and agility for Microsoft Windows 2012 Hyper-V
• Enhanced VMware shared infrastructure and hybrid cloud environments with expanded support of VMware vSphere® Storage APIs, Horizon™ Suite, and vCloud® Suite
• Continuous data access during controller upgrades
• Latest storage protocols including SMB 3.0, pNFS v4.1, iSCSI, FCoE, and Fibre Channel
• New assessment, migration, and optimization services, plus enhanced implementation services
• Automation and monitoring enhancements for the NetApp OnCommand® Management Suite

NetApp’s Vision for Software-Defined Storage

Software-defined storage (SDS) is one component of the emerging software-defined data center (SDDC) model, which focuses on agility in delivering IT services to application owners while improving operational and IT resource efficiency. Akin to virtual machines and server virtualization, clustered Data ONTAP abstracts physical storage into a set of Storage Virtual Machines (SVM; formerly known as vServer). This allows NetApp to deliver native multi-tenant, policy-based storage services via programmable APIs and application integrations. Clustered Data ONTAP is the first storage and data management solution that makes the promise of SDS attainable today.

“CIOs are moving from builders of applications and operators of data centers to brokers of information services to the business,” said Jay Kidd, senior vice president and chief technology officer, NetApp. “This new role requires technologies that can speed IT response time and drive operational and resource efficiency. Clustered Data ONTAP fills this need today, providing the key building block that delivers the benefits of software-defined storage models and will replace existing slow and inefficient siloed approaches. Our new software gives IT unsurpassed agility, including the flexibility to deploy across multiple platforms.”

Quality of service and data protection enhancements help IT to automate application provisioning based on service level and to realize operational benefits from pre-set policy-based security and delegation. These features and capabilities enable IT teams to scale infrastructure to fit business needs, decrease the cost to run applications, and achieve higher levels of operational efficiency.

Customer Momentum with Clustered Data ONTAP

Clustered Data ONTAP offers compelling value to both the enterprise private cloud and public cloud service providers. The software’s unified architecture services a range of workloads–from the most demanding to the most unique across virtualized environments, scale-out NAS, and enterprise applications. During the past year companies across all industries have adopted clustered Data ONTAP with a 4x increase in clustered nodes resulting in 100% quarter over quarter growth of deployments. Cloud providers, whose business reputation depends on continuously running operations, are bringing centralized management to the data center with FlexPod® from NetApp and Cisco with clustered Data ONTAP.

Areas of high adoption of clustered Data ONTAP include:

• Virtualized environments. Organizations use private clouds to consolidate multiple applications into a shared environment, so IT is delivered like a service provider. Clustered Data ONTAP's unified architecture services a broad range of workloads on a standard platform.
• Scale-out NAS. Traditionally, NAS has been used to meet the requirements for storing files on a network for access by a few or for backup purposes. With clustered Data ONTAP, customers can grow from a few terabytes to tens of petabytes without reconfiguring running applications.
• Enterprise applications. As IT becomes integral to business operations, the impact of downtime on tier 1 applications negatively affects budgets and productivity. Clustered Data ONTAP improves service levels over the lifecycle of an application with the ability to dynamically assign, promote and retire storage resources.

Clustered Data ONTAP continues to deliver up to 50% greater storage efficiency than non NetApp environments. The software also delivers greater than 99.999% availability as reported by AutoSupport™, NetApp’s global remote automation and predictive guidance solution which leverages an intelligent data analytics engine to identify at risk systems. Clustered Data ONTAP innovations are protected by more than 1,500 U.S. and international patents and patent applications.    

Customer Successes Fueled by Clustered Data ONTAP

• Dominion Enterprises. Dominion Enterprises, a media and information services company, maintains websites for 40 market-leading websites with a total of more than 20 million unique monthly visitors. Each of Dominion’s customers requires a complex data storage infrastructure that support both SAN and NAS workloads. With clustered Data ONTAP, Dominion can easily move huge volumes of data—photos, videos, and other content—independent of the underlying hardware, allowing the IT team to segregate businesses, create different storage tiers, and promote or demote volumes, all transparent within a single namespace.
• Cirrity: Clustered Data ONTAP is ideal for service providers consolidating multiple applications onto a shared environment. NetApp Customer Cirrity, a leading cloud service provider for regulated industries such as healthcare, provides a backbone for its managed service provider customers, making time to service critical workloads unpredictable, and workload isolation paramount. They start up hundreds of virtual machines a week, and balance the workload across the cluster. Clustered Data ONTAP allows Cirrity to get customers up and running in a few hours and guarantee 100% uptime.
New End-to-End Services Offerings for Clustered Data ONTAP

NetApp unveiled new and refreshed services, available from NetApp and its partners that help customers realize the benefits of clustered Data ONTAP faster and increase the return on their storage investments. With NetApp clustered Data ONTAP services, businesses can align IT to their strategic goals, deploy validated architectures, accelerate their path to non-disruptive operations, and achieve high levels of operational excellence. To learn more visit NetApp’s Services and Support website.

As part of today’s announcement, NetApp also announced the general availability of Flash Cache™ 2 controller-attached PCIe intelligent caching modules, which increase flash module capacity by 100%, to 2TB, compared to previous generations. The new flash technology, based on NetApp’s patented and patent-pending flash expertise, boosts performance for workloads that are random read intensive, such as file services, messaging, OLTP databases, and server and desktop virtualization.