NetApp guarantees 50 percent less storage in virtual environments

Over my lifetime, I’ve heard the saying over and over again: the only guarantees in life are death and taxes. But NetApp is going out on a limb offering its customers its own guarantee — customers will use 50 percent less storage in their virtual environments with NetApp compared to traditional storage. And the company wants to assure its customers who leverage NetApp’s unique storage-efficiency technologies that they will not only reduce overall storage usage, but also improve performance.

NetApp claims its software features, such as thin provisioning, data deduplication, and space-efficient snapshots, save capacity in VMware environments.

The company maintains that they are confident that customers will use 50 percent less storage, though they also said that the average customer savings are often even greater than that.

By following established best practices implemented by NetApp Professional Services and utilizing storage-efficiency technologies designed into the NetApp Data ONTAP operating system, the company said customers can save capacity and tap into the unrealized potential of their virtual infrastructure with these standard features:

• Thin Provisioning – Improve storage utilization with NetApp FlexVol by aggregating unused capacity across storage volumes and share it dynamically across all applications as needs change.
• Deduplication – Eliminate redundant copies of data on primary, archive, and backup data to gain maximum value from current storage investments and better utilize existing storage capacity.
• RAID-DP – Safeguard data from double disk failure with RAID-DP, NetApp’s unique implementation of RAID 6. NetApp claims it provides better protection and performance levels than RAID 10 without the high-capacity overhead.
• Snapshot — Recover data from a point-in-time copy and better protect data with no performance impact and minimal consumption of storage space.

Customers anywhere in the world who purchase a new system for their virtual desktop and server environment can take advantage of this program. If customers don’t use 50 percent less storage after following best practices, NetApp will provide the additional capacity as needed to meet the shortfall at no additional charge, up to 50 percent of the original capacity purchased.

For more information about NetApp’s guarantee, visit the company’s Web site where you can also access an efficiency calculator.

The NetApp program is starting to roll out now, and the guarantee ends on March 31, 2009.