NetApp integrates with Microsoft toolkit

NetApp has announced an enhanced integration with Microsoft to deliver
enterprise-class data protection solutions to cloud SPs by leveraging the
Microsoft Dynamic Data Center Toolkit for hosters. Although enterprise-class
data protection has historically been too expensive for most small- and
medium-sized businesses to implement themselves, NetApp and Microsoft now enable
SPs to offer enterprise-class data protection to their SMB customers.
Additionally, NetApp announced the availability of new professional service
offerings and additional resources and guidance for service providers to build a
variety of enterprise-class cloud services.

"SMB customers have many of the same disaster recovery and business
continuity requirements as large enterprise organizations, but often they don't
have the necessary skill set or budget needed to achieve the desired results,"
said Laura DuBois, Program VP-Storage Software and Solutions, IDC. "Solutions
that address this gap by providing enterprise-level data protection along with
the support and guidance needed to deploy will be integral in helping SMBs
realize the true benefits of a cloud infrastructure."

The Dynamic Data Center Toolkit provides sample code and guidance for
building cloud services powered by Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V and the
Microsoft System Center Suite. NetApp is currently the only storage vendor to
integrate seamlessly with the Dynamic Data Center Toolkit, enabling service
providers to leverage NetApp's industry-leading integrated data protection
capabilities such as disaster recovery, clustered failover, and backup and
recovery. These unique solutions enable the SPs to expand their service
offerings to accelerate their business, while offering and meeting stringent
service-level agreements (SLAs) for their customers. Additionally, NetApp
storage efficiency capabilities help the SPs to reduce their costs-savings that
are passed along to SMBs.

nGenX Corporation, a regional infrastructure-as-a-service provider and joint
NetApp and Microsoft customer, leveraged the Dynamic Data Center Toolkit to
deliver its Guardian GeoCloud service to its customers. The Guardian GeoCloud
solution, which replicates a customer's data to geo-diverse locations and
automates failover in the event of a disaster, demands a shared storage solution
that meets the highest availability requirements. nGenX leverages NetApp storage
solutions for its Hyper-V based cloud services to provide its customers with the
security of knowing that their data is safe and that they will experience
minimal to no impact to their critical applications, even in the unlikely event
of a complete data center failure. Service providers such as nGenX can now take
advantage of the efficiencies inherent in the NetApp and Microsoft solution to
make these types of robust services available to smaller enterprises through the
cloud at an affordable price.

"The Microsoft Dynamic Data Center Toolkit allowed us to leverage NetApp
technologies, which are a fundamental building block of our Guardian GeoCloud
solution, to deliver a unique service and set ourselves apart in the
marketplace," said Robert A. Bye, Executive VP,nGenX. "Using NetApp storage
efficiency technologies such as thin provisioning and de-duplication in
Microsoft Hyper-V environments help us to maximize infrastructure utilization
and lower the costs for the end user. As a result, we use 50 percent to 60
percent less storage than we would otherwise need to support cloud services for
our customers. We are exploding some myths about the affordability of
enterprise-class disaster recovery for our customers."

Additional Professional Services and Solutions for SPs

To supplement today's announcement, NetApp also unveiled new consulting
offerings and design guidance documentation for Microsoft environments, along
with new capabilities to help service providers improve their SLAs.

To help SPs reduce the risk and complexity of deploying a NetApp and
Microsoft solution on their own, NetApp introduced new professional services
specifically designed for Microsoft environments. The new offerings assist
service providers across all phases of a shared infrastructure deployment,
including assessment, planning, architectural design, and best-practices-based
implementation. Delivered by an expert consulting team and based on a proven
service methodology, these new offerings support services built using the
Dynamic Data Center Toolkit integrations to provide NetApp storage and data
protection for Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, and Microsoft
SharePoint infrastructures.

NetApp has also published new design guidance documentation to give service
providers best practices around rapidly and efficiently deploying as-a-service
offerings for their customers.

Finally, to provide further assistance to SPs, who are deploying NetApp data
protection as a service (DPaaS), NetApp has partnered with InControl software to
help them in monitoring and meeting their customers' SLAs. InControl software
can be deployed in a NetApp DPaaS environment to provide real-time SLA and key
performance indicator monitoring. This data informs administrators of upcoming
SLA issues as they happen, helping service providers manage SLAs proactively
rather than reactively, to increase customer satisfaction and improve business
processes.