NetApp Bolsters Management Capabilities, Provides Common Foundation for Enterprise Customers’ Private, Public, and Hybrid Clouds

More than One Billion End Users Receive Cloud Services Built on NetApp

SUNNYVALE, Calif.— — Cloud computing has swiftly moved from industry hype to a top IT initiative, with more CIOs building a private cloud, evaluating service providers for public cloud services, or employing a hybrid model that combines the best of both. Through an innovative global ecosystem of cloud partners and a product portfolio that offers new integrated cloud management capabilities and pre-validated cloud infrastructure solutions, NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) helps enterprise customers accelerate and simplify their transition to private, public, and hybrid cloud models.

Today, NetApp is announcing new technologies within NetApp® OnCommand™ management software that control, automate, and analyze the shared storage infrastructure for greater optimization and service efficiency. And to extend these capabilities beyond storage for a complete enterprise cloud infrastructure service, NetApp is enhancing its Alliance Technology Partner Program with the inclusion of cloud management leaders, enabling integration between industry-leading cloud management solutions and NetApp OnCommand to provide end-to-end management of the full-stack cloud infrastructure.

“IT leaders are seeking alternatives that help them keep pace with the demands of their business today while allowing them to adapt and evolve as their business grows,” said Val Bercovici, cloud czar at NetApp. “Winners in this market are thinking, choosing, and behaving differently. Enterprises, government organizations, and partners are turning to NetApp to help them transition to a flexible and efficient shared IT infrastructure—the foundation for cloud computing—that will help them be ready for the future and enable IT to accelerate business growth.”

NetApp provides the storage foundation for cloud with the NetApp Unified Storage Architecture and a comprehensive set of storage and data management capabilities built on Data ONTAP®. NetApp’s flexible and efficient shared IT infrastructure provides a secure, multi-tenant solution that can dynamically scale up or back down to meet changing demand. Enterprise customers can transition to a private cloud environment at their own pace as their business grows, without disrupting their IT infrastructure.

Key Facts

*NetApp’s new OnCommand management software delivers four fundamental elements that compose a cloud: service catalog, service analytics, automation, and self-service. The new NetApp OnCommand unified manager enables the creation of a storage service catalog and provides policy-based automation, including provisioning, data protection, and service monitoring. In addition, new NetApp OnCommand Insight provides the service analytics for storage and the rest of the infrastructure so customers have the visibility and knowledge needed to optimize a cloud service delivery. This includes usage-based metering, service-level monitoring, and performance and capacity modeling and planning.
*Building on its Alliance Technology Partner Program, NetApp has integrated nearly 20 enterprise cloud management partners, including BMC, CA, Fujitsu, Microsoft, newScale, Tivoli, and VMware. These partners’ cloud management software solutions enable automation and management of the cloud infrastructure and integrate with NetApp OnCommand to incorporate NetApp’s innovative storage into a full-stack orchestration to increase flexibility and efficiency while reducing overall total cost of ownership and complexity.
*Today’s news builds on the tremendous cloud momentum NetApp has achieved over the past year. Last June, NetApp officially launched its Partner Program for Service Providers, which was the first of its kind in the storage industry and today includes more than 30 service providers delivering more than 50 cloud services around the world. The program is a key part of NetApp’s strategy to broaden and leverage its diverse pathways to reach customers and has helped provide cloud services built on NetApp to over one billion end users.
*In November, NetApp unveiled new platform features, products, and technologies—including the first Cisco and NetApp FlexPod™ solution with VMware—to help customers transition to a flexible and efficient shared IT infrastructure, the foundation for cloud computing. And with more than 150 customers having already implemented joint data center solutions based on the FlexPod design architecture, last month NetApp and Cisco introduced a new design guide for FlexPod that supports SAP applications, as well as the new NetApp Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track with Cisco in collaboration with Microsoft, giving partners and customers greater flexibility and freedom of choice as they transition to the cloud. Leading global and regional system integrators are leveraging these integrated private cloud solutions and tailoring them to each customer’s unique business requirements.

Supporting Quotes

*Steve Duplessie, Founder and Senior Analyst at ESG
“Our research consistently shows that material business process improvements and cost reductions are the easiest way to justify IT investments. The promise of cloud implementations, including private, public, and hybrid approaches, is to deliver on both: making business more agile while making IT more efficient. Thus there are substantial pressure and opportunity for those organizations and cloud service providers to build innovative, economic, and secure infrastructures. Today’s NetApp announcements focusing on service automation and analytics are destined to be a cornerstone for any cloud environment because these capabilities along with adjoining partners’ feature sets help optimize service levels at the lowest possible cost.”
*Jorge Pazos, Chief Information Officer for City of Melrose
“The regionalization of IT services is an initiative being pursued by the City of Melrose as a means to reduce the time and money municipalities spend managing IT and shift the focus from managing infrastructure to consuming IT services. Our first step was to build a private cloud that would provide the flexibility, scalability, and security required to deliver a broad set of services efficiently and cost effectively. We chose Cisco, NetApp, and VMware as the best-in-class shared infrastructure for our cloud, and already we have realized a 40% savings in costs.”
*George L. Reed II, Chief Information Officer of Seven Corners, Inc.
“In our industry, the first company to deliver new services typically captures over 50% of the revenue opportunity. The agility and flexibility we’ve gained from moving to a private cloud help us deliver products faster, quickly identify our most productive programs, and rapidly capitalize on successes. Upon project completion, we plan to store 100% of our data on NetApp and deliver all of our IT services based on a shared infrastructure from Cisco, NetApp, and VMware.”
*John George, Senior VP and Chief Information and Innovation Officer, Vangent, Inc.
“Our primary focus is on providing information management and business process services that help federal and international governments, higher education institutions, and corporations achieve greater flexibility and efficiency that allows them to be more competitive. To deliver on these capabilities, we turned to NetApp, Cisco and Microsoft to provide a secure and robust shared infrastructure for our enterprise private cloud. The efficiencies we achieve by using the NetApp Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track with Cisco solution enables us to give our customers the performance and flexibility they need at an affordable price, delivering on the promise of cloud computing in a unique way.”

NetApp’s Home for All Things Cloud
Visit NetApp’s new home for all things cloud to learn how industry leaders have embraced the cloud for real business benefits. Learn how technology leaders, service providers, and systems integrators are using cloud solutions to achieve greater flexibility.

About NetApp
NetApp creates innovative storage and data management solutions that accelerate business breakthroughs and deliver outstanding cost efficiency. Discover NetApp’s passion for helping companies around the world go further, faster at www.netapp.com.


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Addendum: Customer and Partner Quote Sheet
NetApp works with many technology partners, channel partners, value-added resellers, systems integrators, and service providers to deliver integrated, innovative solutions that help customers such as City of Melrose, Princeton Insurance, Seven Corners, and Walz Group accelerate and simplify their transition to the cloud. Here’s what some of them are saying:

Kia Behnia, Chief Technology Officer at BMC
“Companies moving from virtualization to cloud computing are finding that management software plays a critical role in delivering the self-service and orchestration capabilities necessary to deliver a flexible, rapidly provisioned, and well-run cloud computing environment. Our partnership and integration with NetApp’s storage management solutions enable BMC’s Dynamic Business Service Management platform to provision and manage the full stack for cloud and non-cloud services.”

Karen Sage, Vice President, Technology Alliances and Industry Solutions at CA Technologies
“CA Technologies’ partnership with NetApp helps joint customers reduce data center complexity, lower costs, and achieve a more agile IT service delivery model. The integration of our service automation and service assurance solutions with NetApp’s storage management solutions enables customers to accelerate cloud computing-based service deployments through greater visibility, control, and policy-based automation of their virtualized environments.”

David Lawler, Vice President, Marketing at Cisco
“Cisco partners closely with industry-leading storage vendors such as NetApp to offer pre-validated data center design architectures and integrated systems for enterprise customers that are transitioning to a cloud. The FlexPod design architecture combines NetApp storage solutions with Cisco UCS, Cisco Nexus, and our recently acquired newScale cloud management software to simplify and accelerate the delivery of cloud services for our customers.”

Robert Boles, Senior Vice President, IT Infrastructure Services at Cognizant
“At Cognizant, our IT Infrastructure practice provides clients with world-class and innovative data center solutions that enhance and optimize the data center of the future. As we help our clients navigate through the complicated evolution of virtual infrastructure and cloud computing, Cognizant is working with industry-leading partners such as NetApp to provide private cloud solutions that deliver cost savings, reliability, and agility.”

Andre Kiehne, Vice President Cloud Business at Fujitsu
“IT organizations today require flexible IT environments that allow them to keep pace with the ever-changing market. Our partnership with NetApp enables us to deliver trusted cloud solutions and services for our customers, resolving the burden of fixed costs and inflexible infrastructures. Together, we provide innovative solutions that help companies use IT to respond to the dynamic business needs and capitalize on new opportunities for growth.”

Lauren States, Vice President, CTO Cloud Computing, IBM
“IBM is making cloud computing a reality for enterprises" said Lauren States, Vice President, CTO Cloud Computing, IBM. “IBM delivers a secure scalable infrastructure for private clouds based on deep integration between IBM Tivoli, IBM Storage, and IBM cloud design/delivery services provided by IBM Global Technology Services to offer customers increased IT efficiency and enhance business flexibility. The storage relationship with NetApp on IBM N series helps provide clients IBM storage choices in their cloud deployment.”

Andy Cadwell, Senior Vice President of Sales, INX
“Cloud computing is revolutionizing the data center, creating new efficiencies and increasing business flexibility for companies of all sizes. INX helps enterprise clients accelerate their transition to private clouds with validated, turnkey designs built on a secure and scalable NetApp storage foundation. INX also offers a range of cloud services based on NetApp technology, including managed and hosted services for development, testing, production, and disaster recovery.”

Billy Steeghs, Senior Vice President of IT at MDI
“MDI collaborates with clients to provide greater visibility into their healthcare data so they can control costs. To deliver such cutting-edge healthcare analytics and data management services, MDI relies on a highly capable, robust private cloud platform. Unpredictability is the nature of our business. The Cisco UCS, NetApp, and VMware solution delivers the functionality we require today with multidimensional scalability to accommodate rapidly changing business requirements.”

Mike Schutz, Senior Director of Windows Server Marketing at Microsoft Corp.
“We’re pleased to work with NetApp on integrating Microsoft System Center advanced management capabilities with the new NetApp OnCommand. Companies deploying Microsoft private cloud solutions will benefit from combining System Center, Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V, and NetApp OnCommand for a common management platform. This integration, combined with turnkey infrastructure solutions such as NetApp Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track with Cisco, facilitates deployment of private cloud solutions for our joint customers.”

Darby O’Neill, Vice President of IT at Princeton Insurance
“Princeton Insurance is a data-centric company. We continually analyze more than 35 years of data to identify new and emerging exposure issues that, when coupled with changes made by competitors, make it necessary for us to adjust coverage or offer new products on a regular basis. Our systems have to keep pace with those changes. Working with three industry leaders, NetApp, Cisco, and VMware, was a wise choice for us because they provided the most stable, innovative, and cost-effective platform for our private cloud. Since we’ve deployed the cloud solution, we’ve had the ability to adjust our business solutions based on our business needs real time.”

Chuck Parker, Chief Commercial Officer, Technicolor
"We are pleased to partner with NetApp for our Technicolor MediAssurance service. Technicolor has long been trusted to preserve and protect the valued assets of our content-owner customers, and we needed a storage partner that could help us build a secure, scalable, and flexible service to meet their needs. Our recently announced cloud-based storage service supports an industry shift from physical to digital media, offers pay-as-you-go pricing, and allows our customers to quickly scale capacity up or down in response to changes in demand.”

Gary Green, Vice President, Global Strategic Alliances at VMware
“Together, VMware and NetApp help customers transform IT operations to achieve the agility and economics of cloud computing by simplifying and automating the management of IT services. Traditional management tools and processes, which were designed to handle discrete processes across static computing stacks, cannot keep pace with the demands of cloud computing, where provisioning and capacity are highly dynamic, and configurations are fluid. We believe that the integration of NetApp storage management software with VMware vSphere®, vCenter™ and vCloud® solutions will help our joint customers modernize their operations and take the next step in the journey toward a more simplified, agile approach to IT.”

Bart Falzarano, Chief Information Security Officer at Walz Group
“The Walz Group has been recognized as one of the fastest growing private firms in the United States, providing critical communications and regulatory compliance solutions across many industries. Seizing opportunity, however, has not been without challenges. Meeting business demands on the company’s traditional IT infrastructure meant dedicating more and more resources to daily operations and support. We turned to NetApp, VMware, and Cisco as our partners of choice for providing a robust shared infrastructure for our enterprise private cloud to create innovative products, extensibility to support growth and opportunity, cost efficiencies, and agility to deliver ahead of the competition.”

Robert Olwig, Vice President, Corporate Business Development at World Wide Technology
“World Wide Technology assists enterprises, government agencies, and service providers to achieve competitive advantage and speed time to market by implementing cloud computing environments built on a NetApp storage foundation. Working together, World Wide and NetApp help our joint customers transform the way they do the business of IT using cloud technology.”