NetApp Puts its Money where its Virtualisation is

By Greg McNevin

October 2, 2008: In an unprecedented announcement today, NetApp has guaranteed that customers who take advantage of its solutions will use 50 percent less storage in their virtual environments than they would if they went with traditional storage.

Enthusiasm for virtualisation has dipped slightly of late, and NetApp wants reinforce the benefits of its storage-efficiency technologies, saying they will reduce overall storage usage while improving performance.

“The pressure for cost reduction has led to the rapid adoption of storage-efficiency technologies such as thin provisioning, deduplication, RAID-DP, and Snapshot, which come standard on NetApp systems,” says Jay Kidd, chief marketing officer of NetApp.

“Our customers are consistently realising unprecedented space savings greater than 70 percent with these technologies in their virtual infrastructures. We're so confident about our space-saving features that we are assuring customers they will use at least 50 percent less storage in their virtual desktop and server environments.”

NetApp says that industry estimates show that storage utilisation rates average 25-40 percent, leaving the average enterprise less than half the storage they buy. The company adds that much of the data stored on disk is also redundant, a point that is particularly true in virtual server environments where the same server operating system and application software are stored repeatedly in each virtual machine.

NetApp says its solutions take advantage of thin provisioning, deduplication, RAID-DP and Snapshot to significantly reduce storage requirements, and claims that if customers don't use 50 percent less storage after following best practices, it will provide the additional capacity as needed to meet the shortfall at no additional charge.

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