In an unprecedented announcement today, NetApp (NASDAQ:NTAP) offered customers a guarantee* that they will use 50% less storage in their virtual environments with NetApp® compared to traditional storage. NetApp wants to assure customers who choose NetApp and leverage its unique storage-efficiency technologies that they will reduce their 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,” said Jay Kidd, chief marketing officer of NetApp. “Our customers are consistently realizing unprecedented space savings greater than 70% 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% less storage in their virtual desktop and server environments.”

According to industry estimates, storage utilization rates average 25–40%. This means that the average IT organization does not use more than half the storage they buy. In addition, much of the data stored on disk is redundant. This is especially true in virtual server environments in which the same server operating system and application software are stored repeatedly in each virtual machine. Not only is this a waste of storage, it is a waste of power and floor space — all of which increase IT costs.

NetApp has long specialized in driving inefficiencies out of customers’ data centers. As NetApp’s expertise and feature-set have grown, it has proven to reduce 50% of customers’ storage, even for those on the leading edge of efficiency techniques using traditional storage. As a result, today NetApp is confident that customers will use 50% less storage, although the average customer savings are often greater. By following established best practices implemented by NetApp Professional Services and utilizing storage-efficiency technologies designed into the NetApp Data ONTAP® operating system, 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 — Quickly and easily 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 that provides protection without compromising performance, even for the most demanding applications. RAID-DP provides higher protection and performance levels than RAID 10 without the high-capacity overhead.
• Snapshot — Rapidly recover data from a point-in-time copy and better protect data with no performance impact and minimal consumption of storage space.

LandAmerica Financial Group, Inc. credits its move to NetApp centralized storage for a 70% reduction in overall capacity requirements. The company estimates that 30% savings come from eliminating local disk and taking advantage of thin provisioning, and that another 40% come from NetApp deduplication technology used to eliminate redundant data objects in both primary and backup data sets. To date, LandAmerica has achieved anywhere from 40% to 70% capacity savings by turning on deduplication across a range of data sets. NetApp Snapshot technology, which LandAmerica uses for rapid data backup and recovery, also minimizes storage consumption.

“If we showed you a graph of our disk usage over time, you’d see the incredible shrinking disk that’s a result of deploying NetApp storage," said Jack Kinsey, assistant vice president, Network Systems manager. "In the past, we’ve been in the very uncomfortable position of being maxed out in every vector in our data center — floor space, rack space, power, cooling. But today, utilizing blade servers, VMware®, and NetApp storage with space-reduction technologies, we’re positioned to avoid that predicament again.”

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% 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% of the original capacity purchased. Qualifying service delivery is available from NetApp Global Services or participating Authorized Professional Service Partners in Networked Storage for Virtualized Platforms.

For more information, visit www.netapp.com/guarantee, where you can access the new NetApp Storage Efficiency Calculator to evaluate your current environment and learn how NetApp storage-efficiency technologies can lead to higher storage utilization.

To learn more about the latest in NetApp and industry deduplication news, visit NetApp’s Dr. Dedupe Blog at http://blogs.netapp.com/drdedupe/.

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