NetApp Promotes Better Data Centre Management

March 20, 2007: NetApp is boasting that it can help customers cut up to 80 percent of data centre power consumption through more efficient data management.

According to NetApp, powering the data centre is one of the top issues facing enterprises today. Citing a recent survey of its customers, the company says that 59 percent indicated a serious focus on addressing power consumption while 46 percent are already making investments.

“We're seeing an increasing number of customers constrained by the physical limits of their data centres: they can't add more power, they're running out of space, and they can't add more cooling,” said Chris Bennett, vice president, Core Systems, NetApp. “While the issue of power consumption is certainly gaining a lot of attention in the server environment, customers are now looking beyond servers to other major consumers of data centre power, and storage is certainly one of them.

NetApp believes that one solution to cutting energy consumption is getting increased work out of fewer disks and enabling widespread use of higher-capacity and lower-power disks. By replacing disks hastily added to combat explosive data growth with higher capacity, more efficient alternatives, storage density can be reduced along with the supporting infrastructure.

NetApp uses web host ASIO.Net as an example. By redesigning storage infrastructure the company was able to make power savings of 80 percent.

“The redesigned infrastructure composed of IBM, Network Appliance, and VMware products met the energy consumption and system redundancy and scalability requirements of AISO.Net clients,” said Chris Lusk, vice president, Open Systems and Storage, Sirius Computer Solutions. “We were able to reduce the AISO.Net data centre footprint to dramatically shrink their overall power consumption.”

ASIO says that NetApp’s Snapshot technology enabled it to create a single copy of data that can be used for multiple purposes, enabling backup systems to be used for compliance and asynchronous disaster recovery for example.

With data storage requirements exploding across the board, technologies such as data deduplicaion, Snapshot and virtualisation are fast becoming more than a luxury for companies striving for compliance and business continuity.

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