Data storage and data management specialist NetApp announced enhanced integration with Microsoft to deliver data protection solutions to cloud service providers by leveraging the Microsoft Dynamic Data Center Toolkit for Hosters. Additionally, NetApp announced the availability of professional service offerings and additional resources and guidance for service providers to build a variety of enterprise-class cloud services.
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. John Zanni, general manager of worldwide hosting for the communications sector at Microsoft, said small to medium-size businesses (SMBs) are demanding enterprise-class disaster recovery solutions, and hosting service providers are in a tremendous position to fill that demand as more SMBs move toward hosted IT services.
“We’re pleased to be working with NetApp as part of the Dynamic Data Center Alliance to enable hosting service providers to offer these disaster recovery solutions, and to take another step to move beyond commoditized hosting services to become full-service IT providers to their customers,” he said.
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 company’s executive vice president, Robert Bye, said using NetApp storage efficiency technologies such as thin provisioning and deduplication in Microsoft Hyper-V environments helps them maximize infrastructure utilization and lower costs for the end user. “As a result, we use 50 percent-60 percent less storage than we would otherwise need to support cloud services for our customers,” he said. “We are really exploding some myths about the affordability of enterprise-class disaster recovery for our customers.”
NetApp also unveiled consulting offerings and design guidance documentation for Microsoft environments, along with new capabilities to help service providers improve their SLAs. NetApp noted these professional services are 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.
NetApp also published new design guidance documentation to give service providers best practices around deploying as-a-service offerings for their customers. The guidance is designed to help service providers design and deploy the following cost-effective enterprise-class services: Exchange as a service, SharePoint as a service, Infrastructure as a service, Storage as a service and Desktop as a service.
Finally, to provide further assistance to service providers deploying NetApp data protection as a service (DPAAS), NetApp has partnered with InControl software to help service providers monitor and meet 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, the company noted.