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, 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 non-disruptive operations, and grow the business without limits.e 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.
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 analyse data.
- Storage Efficiency: Cost containment in an era of monumental growth means that 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.
- Non-disruptive Operations: NetApp delivers a storage environment with always-on availability. Zero downtime means that business-critical applications such as Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, and SQL Server, as well as solutions from Oracle, SAPAG, 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 unauthorised 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 operational scalability will keep pace indefinitely, keeping investments and capabilities on track with their business.
- Seamless Scaling: Scaling efficiently means scaling without the need to add more people to manage the environment, sacrifice performance, or sacrifice capacity. Infinite Volume creates a single volume that can scale up to 20PB as a single scalable entity.
- Unified Architecture: One architecture for many diverse workloads gives customers the flexibility to deal with changes in storage requirements. NetApp introduced the industry’s first unified storage architecture and Data ONTAP is currently the industry’s only unified scale-out platform that delivers rich data management and data protection capabilities with clustering technology. This enables customers to scale out as well as scale up seamlessly across low-end through high-end systems in a single cluster. In addition, for remote offices, Data ONTAP Edge is a low-cost data storage system that runs in a virtual machine on the VMware vSphere platform and is designed to complement NetApp FAS and V-Series storage systems, managing the needs of direct-attached storage.
- Secure Multi-tenancy: Secure separation of data in cloud environments takes virtualisation to the next level, providing a bridge to cloud computing. Close collaboration between NetApp, Cisco, and VMware has resulted in a secure multi-tenancy solution to partition shared IT infrastructures from servers to storage.