NetApp partners handed keys to data centre

Storage vendor NetApp has announced it will hand over some of the intellectual property it has acquired helping service providers build 'storage as a service' offerings to its channel partners.

The NetApp Dynamic Data Centre Solution (NDDCS) is a documented set of best practices NetApp has learned by building storage infrastructures for Telstra and others.

In 2008, NetApp and Telstra built the carrier an IP SAN solution called OmniPresence, which featured over 20 petabytes of storage on 30 NetApp arrays, Cisco switches, HP OpenView network management software and Symantec backup software.

NetApp consulting systems engineer John Martin said much of the IP gained from OmniPresence had been passed on to NetApp service provider customers around the globe and it would now be passed on to systems integrator partners via NDDCS.

Select Australian partners including Thomas Duryea Consulting, Dimension Data, Data#3, Alphawest, PPR Solutions and XSI had already signed up.

Martin described the NDDCS as a "run book" of well-defined best practices to "help resellers and channel partners deploy cloud solutions to customers.

"It is all the IP you need to implement IT-as-a-service without reinventing the wheel," he said.

NetApp's channel partners, however, will have to make use of the materials in direct competition with NetApp's own services team, which Martin credited with writing a good deal of the best practices literature in the first place.

"Ours is among the best service teams in the world," he said. "We evolved this [IP] with Telstra. It was documented such that it can be a repeatable process."

Martin said that by following the best practices, service providers would be able to provision new storage "in minutes" rather than it taking days.

Release of ONTAP 8

NetApp timed the announcement of NDDCS with the release of its latest storage operating system, Data ONTAP 8.

ONTAP 8 was based on enhancements made to its predecessor (ONTAP 7) and the technology acquired through NetApp's US$300 million purchase of Spinnaker, from which it built the Data ONTAP GX operating system.

"ONTAP 8 completes the convergence process between those two products," Martin said.

The new operating system builds on the 'multi-store' and 'data motion' virtualisation technologies developed during ONTAP 7's shelf-life.

"We are making it more elegant and easier to manage," Martin said. "We don't just move LUNs (storage units) around but the entire context around it - the security, the IP address, everything with it," he said. "It is something we've offered in ONTAP 7 but now it's a point-and-shoot product."

Martin said all new NetApp arrays with more than 4GB of RAM (memory) would be shipped with the latest OS. He expected ONTAP 7 to still be supported for "another couple of years" while he expected customers of ONTAP GX to "transition to 8 in one form or another" much sooner.

The vendor also announced that as of September it would ship a line of flash-based cache PCi cards. Dubbed Performance Acceleration Modules, these flash-based cards are touted to provide "fibre channel performance out of SATA drives."