NetApp attacks market with dynamic virtualisation
NetApp attacks market with dynamic virtualisation
The disadvantage of having so much virtualisation software to choose from these days is that it is difficult for users to be sure of which one offers the best service to suit their needs.
NetApp is the latest vendor to claim that it has the most sophisticated technology on offer with the release of Data ONTAP 7G, which it claims offers a number of features that cannot be found anywhere else.
According to Patrick Rogers, the vice president of partners and solutions for NetApp, Data ONTAP 7G is much more dynamic than any of the competing virtualisation solutions provided by the likes of IBM, HP, EMC and Hitachi Data Systems.
"One of the distinct advantages includes our ability to provide virtualisation across many different types of storage systems, which include SANs, NAS' and ISCSI. This is not possible with our competitors, who only concentrate on virtualisation across SANs."
Rogers added that the ONTAP 7G uses a feature called FlexVol to provide much more flexible storage, which pools together multiple disks into one storage area, and divides those areas up into policy driven volumes, which are not tied to physical storage.
This means that data can be extracted from any of the disks and controlled in a customised area for focused management of specifically chosen information.
In addition, all of the empty disk space used on separate disks can be combined together in the pool so that the widened area of storage contains only one area of free space, instead of multiple areas on different disks. This means that less space is wasted.
Again, Rogers pointed out why this puts NetApp ahead of its competitors:
"This is our most significant announcement of the year. It is also much more dynamic than other virtualisation systems. Everybody else' virtualisation software is static. Inside an IBM system they have a whole bunch of drives and shelves and they organise those shelves into logical groups. Then they create stripes out of those logical groups, and say that this is virtualisation.
"However, the problem is that when they want to create a new volume, or stripe, the view of the new volume won't automatically spread itself across the new drives. So they can't grow a new volume or stripe without having to manually re-configure all of the stripes first. With ONTAP 7G you can add a new disk drive into that physical pool and it will automatically spread all of the virtual volumes across it."
Rogers also talked about the improved performance and data backup provisions provide by the new virtualisation software too.
"Performance is usually limited by how many spindles you have in each drive so you can only get so much traffic through each disk drive. What we do is we take all the drives and stack them up and spread every volume across all of the drives. So even your smallest volumes have the performance of ten drives with all the spindles, which is really revolutionary."
"As for backup, all we do is update new information to sit with the old data, instead of wasting time by backing up everything all of the time. It only backups what is necessary instead of what is unnecessary."
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