Our FoxNet consulting team recently returned from a NetApp education day where we had the opportunity to learn more about NetApp Clustered ONTAP, a new storage solution for today’s virtualized enterprise environments.
We’ve talked about the storage challenges that exist for today’s enterprise previously in this blog. Storage requirements are seemingly mushrooming in the data center, as IT organizations struggle to contain, retain and manage data. Files are getting bigger. Formats are richer. And users have what is seems is an infinite appetite for even more information.
This has put most IT organizations in a position where they have outgrown their storage capacity. They need to add more storage, and they need better performance to allow users to sift through and retrieve data. While new controllers can be added, these devices have typically operated independently from each other. If the issue is related to performance as well as capacity, then IT organizations often face a complete rip and replace of their storage system. In either case this also means that data contained in these systems has to be migrated. The more the controllers there are; the more difficult and time consuming the problem.
NetApp Clustered ONTAP gives customers the ability to connect multiple HA pairs with a 10GbE cluster interconnect network, which allows IT organizations to add additional controllers seamlessly to the resource pool residing on a shared storage infrastructure. Host and client connections can move seamlessly around the resource pool so existing workloads can be easily balanced over available workloads and new workloads can be easily deployed.
According to our partner NetApp, NetApp Clustered ONTAP is the first product to offer a complete scale-out solution that provides an adaptable, always-on storage infrastructure for today’s highly virtualized enterprise environments. Building on NetApp’s leading storage efficiency features, Data ONTAP 8 adds to this industry-leading unified (FC, FCoE, iSCSI, NFS, pNFS, CIFS) storage platform massive scalability, improved management for large-scale deployments, and, most importantly, nondisrupive operations. Nondisruptive operations means you can eliminate planned downtime, even during servicing and upgrades.
If your company is reviewing its storage strategy, is looking to upgrade its storage system, or is in need of a partner to devise and implement NetApp’s newest NetApp Clustered ONTAP storage technology, FoxNet has significant expertise in this area, having crafted creative storage solutions for many of our clients. Drop us a line to discuss your storage needs at info@206.198.185.142
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