NetApp has announced new products and capabilities as part of the NetApp Manageability Software Family to enable customers to transform their datacenter architectures. This announcement is driven by NetApp storage innovations for virtualised servers that will help customers improve their IT infrastructure and processes. Enterprise customers are undergoing significant datacenter transformations to enhance IT flexibility and efficiency as server virtualisation moves into broader deployment. To enable this transformation, NetApp is providing customers a proven storage platform for virtualised environments to achieve increased service levels, higher asset utilisation and greater datacenter power, space and cooling efficiencies.
Jay Kidd, chief marketing officer at NetApp, said: "NetApp will be a major catalyst in enabling customers to capitalise on the next generation of datacenter infrastructure. Today we have established a lead in delivering virtualisation solutions and services that help customers transform their current IT architectures and amplify the impact that IT operations have on their business. Combining VMware's full datacenter virtualisation solutions with NetApp's networked storage solutions is dramatically improving data management and providing customers a path to creating a transparent infrastructure."
Accompanying this release, the company also announced the development of the NetApp Kilo Client, a massive testing environment capable of exceeding the most scalable and extreme performance conditions that most enterprises deploy with NetApp solutions in their datacenters. The NetApp Kilo Client provides an environment in which utility computing approaches can be tested in real-world environments and on a scale unavailable from other storage vendors today.
Thousands of customers are deploying NetApp storage with larger and larger computing grid environments. In order to meet the increasingly demanding requirements of these datacenters, NetApp built the Kilo Client to explore the limits of its storage solutions in a controlled environment and developed best practices in rapid provisioning methodologies. Specifically, NetApp learned how a SAN boot architecture coupled with thin provisioning provides rapid client provisioning and storage consolidation, simplifies the management of large datacenter architectures and reduces the level of power consumption, all for huge overall cost savings.
Aad Dekkers, director of Solutions Marketing, EMEA, at NetApp, said: "The NetApp Kilo Client is a breakthrough architecture that pushes the limits in the testing and development of enterprise grid compute environments. This environment was made possible for our customers due to close collaboration with key partners like AMD, Blade Network Technologies, Brocade, Chelsio Communications, Cisco, IBM, Intel, QLogic, Qlusters and VMware.
The Kilo Client is a technology that delivers the day-to-day business efficiencies promised by utility computing and makes those efficiencies not just a theoretical possibility, but a practical consideration for commercial usage today." The Kilo Client, a 1,500-node diskless enterprise server farm located at the NetApp RTP facilities, runs multiple operating systems including Windows, UNIX and Linux. Additionally, the Kilo Client supports NAS, FC SAN and IP SAN protocols. The system leverages NetApp FlexClone technology to rapidly create system images without making full physical copies of those images. This approach affords near-instantaneous image provisioning, maximum performance and unprecedented flexibility in a footprint of just over 300 square feet.
Dekkers continued: "NetApp is taking a holistic approach to helping users test and build the most energy-efficient datacenters without sacrificing performance and scalability. The NetApp Kilo Client affords end users the right insight into pulling the maximum utilisation from their storage and server virtualisation resources. This isn't a technology of the future - there is absolutely nothing in the Kilo Client test lab that can't be leveraged by NetApp customers today."