NetApp Business Continuity Made Better with VMware

We at Lexcom tend to go on and on about business continuity and for good reason. As many of our customers move toward their goal of having 100% virtualized data centers, they increasingly look for ways to bring the benefits of VMware virtualization to their mission-critical Microsoft applications. Customers planning a new deployment, performing an upgrade, or planning to virtualize 100% of their data center have an ideal opportunity to make the transition to a VMware vSphere virtual infrastructure built on NetApp storage.

Virtualizing Microsoft applications on NetApp unified storage provides enhanced data protection and fully automated disaster recovery capabilities. Typically, a virtualized Microsoft application provides much greater flexibility and complete automation with predefined disaster recovery processes and easier, streamlined recovery in the event of a disaster.

Some key benefits of the overall solution are:

• Reduced disaster recovery costs with SRM. SRM decreases the risks associated with traditional DR. Repeatable, reliable DR processes are easily developed and maintained. Recovery time objective (RTO) durations are improved through the use of DR workflow automation features. In addition, SRM provides a valuable DR testing capability that allows you to quickly and nondisruptively perform DR tests. Maintaining identical physical hardware at both locations is not required; other processes such as testing and development are enabled to make use of the equipment at the DR site.
• Reduced infrastructure costs with NetApp storage solutions. NetApp’s disaster recovery solution helps reduce cost so that the savings achieved at the primary site can be used to fund the DR site. With the NetApp solution, you can achieve multiple levels of storage efficiency at the primary site, and the savings are preserved at the DR site. Built-in WAN acceleration strongly complements this because it reduces the amount of WAN bandwidth required for site-to-site replication transfers by more than 80%. NetApp technologies eliminate the need to maintain twice the disk space at the DR site if you want to perform DR testing without interrupting the site-to-site replication. The key NetApp technologies that enable this are thin provisioning, deduplication, FlexClone, and SnapMirror compression.
• Application-consistent disaster recovery. NetApp provides the capability to recover applications in a consistent state after failover to the DR site. The NetApp application-specific SnapManager products along with SRM offer the ability to maintain a history of multiple, verified, application-consistent recovery points at the DR site. The NetApp SnapManager solution is built using integrated VMware, Microsoft, and NetApp technologies for advanced, application-aware data protection.
• Simplified disaster recovery processes. DR workflow automation provided by SRM and the NetApp Storage Recovery Adapter allow the customer to implement testable, repeatable, and, most importantly, reliable disaster recovery processes.
• Flexible and secure multi-tenancy (SMT). NetApp unified storage with MultiStore capability offers end-to-end data security, nondisruptive data mobility, load balancing across storage controllers, and better manageability in a multi-tenant cloud environment.  MultiStore divides a single storage system into multiple secure partitions called vFiler units. Individual vFiler units can be assigned to separate “tenants,” which can be individual organizations, departments within an organization, or individual applications. The vFiler units can also be shared by multiple organizations depending on the requirements. 

Here is a video that goes over some of the options to incorporate VMware solutions like HA, FT, SRM into your DR strategy:

Contact us if you require any DR planning or implementation services. 

Cisco Live 2011 UK - Live Blog With NetApp About UCS

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NetApp Announces Aquisition of Akorri Inc.

NetApp announced on Friday that they entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Akorri, Inc. Together NetApp and Akorri will provide customers with comprehensive tools to automate and analyze their shared IT infrastructure, efficiently deliver on service levels, and respond to rapidly changing business needs.

Akorri enables IT organizations to increase virtualization ROI through optimization and planning of their virtual and physical infrastructure resources in a continually changing IT data center environment.

Akorri’s BalancePoint software uses cross-domain analysis and advanced analytics to help companies manage, optimize, and plan performance and utilization across their data center infrastructure. BalancePoint provides visibility into the root cause of performance issues through deep drill-down into server and storage resources and the ability to understand both server and storage virtualization. Akorri BalancePoint helps IT organizations to optimize performance and capacity to meet service level objectives at the lowest possible cost.

Traditional enterprise systems management products focus on a single “silo” in the infrastructure, such as storage. Akorri technology correlates both physical and virtual resources across servers and storage, extracting data from multiple sources and layers in a heterogeneous infrastructure to provide near real-time insights and analysis throughout the application workflow path.