NetApp - The Virtual Storage Guy

Site Recovery Manager: It’s Not Just for VMs

A key goal at NetApp is advancing the value of storage in the virtual data center from the traditional model of highly available storage to a more advanced virtual object oriented model. This approach is unified in nature as it provides the traditional functions of high availability, high performance, and the traditional storage provisioning of LUNs and file shares while also expanding into the realm of management of virtualized objects by the virtualization administrative team.

By virtualized objects I am specifically speaking of the objects that a VMware admin care about such as VMs, Datastores, workflow automation tools such SRM or View Manager, etc. For this blog I’d like to share with you an example of the direction NetApp is taking storage virtualization by discussing how to integrate a NetApp NAS file server into a VMware SRM recovery plan.

Has the World Gone Mad?

This may be the question you are asking around the water cooler this morning if you are a server virtualization vendor or the manufacture of legacy storage arrays.

In the past week VMware & NetApp have raised the stakes in the competitive landscape. In this post I'd like to share with you these announcements. It appears both companies are very serious about accelerating the adoption of virtualization technologies within customers’ datacenters.

The Highlight of SNW

I spent today assisting in the setup of our booth at SNW in Orlando. This year one of the NetApp demos is a VMware environment running on a Clariion CX array from EMC and a RAMSAN solid-state array from Texas Memory Systems.

Now you may be asking, “Why would NetApp do this?”

We are want to demonstrate our V-Series storage virtualization technology with heterogeneous storage arrays. See we have taken this VMware environment and reduced its storage requirements to just 10% of what was originally required with traditional and leading edge SSD storage arrays.

It’s an awesome statement that times have changed, technology has advanced, and it is time to virtualize your storage arrays. To emphasize these points, may I ask you to recall what your data center used to look like say three to five years ago?