NetApp Deduplication Delivers Significant Storage Space Savings for Virginia Credit Union and Customers' VMware Environments

Business Wire, Nov 27, 2007

NetApp Customers Fueling Rapid Adoption of Deduplication Technology With More Than 1,000 Licenses for Primary Storage, Backup, and Archival Data

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- NetApp (NASDAQ:NTAP) today announced that its customers have helped NetApp reach a major milestone, with more than 1,000 systems enabled with deduplication. These systems represent over 30 petabytes (PB) of raw storage capacity, making NetApp the leading provider of deduplication technology for a wide variety of applications and storage tiers1. Specifically, NetApp[R] deduplication is providing significant space savings for customers such as Virginia Credit Union, providing a complement to VMware[R] environments. By leveraging NetApp deduplication for VMware Infrastructure, customers are achieving up to 90% space savings to store their VMware virtual machines.

NetApp deduplication technology is an inherent feature in all NetApp storage systems. As enterprises struggle with managing multiple copies of data across their infrastructures, NetApp eliminates redundant data objects to improve space-savings efficiency and reduce physical storage capacity that customers need to purchase and manage for data copy activities. Competing deduplication products simply provide a point solution that narrowly addresses space reduction for data backup environments. Only NetApp delivers deduplication technology that serves primary storage and is integrated into its mainline storage operating system, Data ONTAP[R], at no charge to customers. In addition, NetApp helps customers incorporate deduplication into a wide variety of other environments, including backup data and archival data--all without sacrificing performance.

"Deduplication eliminates the storage of redundant data; depending on the environment, the amount of redundant data can be significant (imagine all the duplicate files, duplicate data within files, and duplicate data in database and email stores across the organization)," wrote Stephanie Balaouras of Forrester Research in the July 2007 report titled Will Data Deduplication Finally Make Disk As Cheap As Tape? "Block-level deduplication is gaining traction in backup, and it is not typically offered as a capability of disk storage systems used to support online workloads. NetApp is an exception."

Among its many benefits to NetApp customers' businesses, deduplication complements VMware environments. NetApp customer Virginia Credit Union is a not-for-profit financial cooperative that serves more than 180,000 members. The cooperative deployed VMware Infrastructure to consolidate servers and quickly create clone copies for test and development. However, the Virginia Credit Union sought greater storage efficiency.

By leveraging NetApp to deduplicate VMware virtual machines, Virginia Credit Union achieved overall space savings of 78%. NetApp deduplication was the most suitable technology addressing Virginia Credit Union's storage capacity problem. NetApp deduplication provided the means to retain long-term business-critical data in compliance with financial regulations in a cost-effective and efficient manner. In addition, by leveraging other NetApp space-saving technologies such as thin provisioning and FlexClone[R], Virginia Credit Union further solved its business need for rapid provisioning of server and data cloning for testing and development purposes without consuming disk space.

"NetApp added a layer of storage intelligence that was missing in our VMware environment," said Rich Barlow, systems architect with Virginia Credit Union. "The combination of virtual machines on NetApp provides us rapid disaster recovery and near instant provisioning in addition to cutting edge, innovative storage management technologies that helped fulfill our core business objective, which is to better serve our members. No storage vendor could provide the magic combination of NetApp space-saving technologies to control our spiraling data consumption, dramatically reduce the amount of storage we use and manage, and shrink the overhead needed to store large amounts of production virtual machines. NetApp deduplication transparently reduced our physical storage space without sacrificing our performance. We're getting our money's worth out of NetApp."

"VMware Infrastructure complements NetApp's deduplication technology," said Parag Patel, vice president alliances, VMware. "An example of this is VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), which enables organizations to consolidate desktops onto server hardware, improving desktop management and reducing support costs. NetApp's data deduplication technology reduces the amount of physical storage needed in a consolidated desktop environment, providing a cost-effective solution that further enhances the robust products included in VMware Infrastructure such as VMware High availability (HA), VMotion, Consolidated Backup and Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS)."

"NetApp and VMware provide our customers with a unique technology match to achieve great efficiency in their data centers," said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Solutions Marketing at NetApp. "Customers that are virtualizing their infrastructures are especially well-positioned to take full advantage of NetApp's complementary space-saving technologies such as deduplication. We are excited about the value our customers are already realizing and look forward to helping more customers deploy these breakthrough features to reduce the amount of disk space needed to store data."