STORAGE

Network Appliance Inc 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. The new NetApp 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 on the market 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 are lower storage management costs and significant time savings as storage is intelligently configured and reconfigured non-disruptively, even during production hours. Data ONTAP 7G also 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. "Data ONTAP 7G simplifies data management and delivers what our customers are asking for -- a flexible storage infrastructure that offers high performance, massive and rapid scalability, and minimal management overhead -- all to achieve maximum value from enterprise data," said Paul Albright, senior vice president of marketing at Network Appliance. "It is also the first storage software to provide dynamic virtualization, a real breakthrough and industry achievement in not only virtualization but also in laying the groundwork for the world's most powerful Storage Grid architecture." "Data ONTAP 7G delivers exceptional business value to help today's enterprise liberate its data for more robust, high-performance applications in workgroups, departments, and data centers," said Steve Duplessie at Enterprise Strategy Group. "Whether an enterprise is looking at a traditional storage approach or a Storage Grid, the latest storage software from NetApp offers compelling benefits." Plus, in order 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. Data ONTAP 7G Features The primary new features of Data ONTAP 7G that bring compelling user benefits to life are FlexVol and FlexClone features. FlexVol is a compelling new feature of Data ONTAP 7G that 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. In short, FlexVol is the feature of Data ONTAP 7G that provides dynamic virtualization. FlexVol enables the precision tailoring of NetApp 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 also providing the performance of large disk pools to even the smallest data sets. FlexVol also allows for the dynamic and non-disruptive provisioning (growing and/or shrinking) of storage volumes and facilitates a utility storage model based on thin provisioning of capacity. FlexVol 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. "Competitive approaches to a solution such as FlexVol are manual, complex, rigid, and disruptive to IT processes and end users," said Albright. "FlexVol represents a giant leap forward in file system and storage virtualization technology." 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. "Application test and development environments have to deal with inordinate complexity and storage overhead to manage multiple cloned copies," continued Albright. "FlexClone technology is revolutionary in the simplicity it delivers, as well as the enormous cost savings that can be realized from its space efficiency relative to competing solutions." As Albright concluded, "The new FlexVol and FlexClone capabilities in Data ONTAP 7G improve storage utilization, increase data application performance, streamline data center operations, enable powerful new application modeling and testing possibilities, free IT personnel for other projects, and ultimately save money. Our new software firmly establishes the NetApp innovation lead in enterprise storage."