Netapp is a leading provider of SAN and NAS solutions. They are innovators in a sector of followers. Netapp developed its own storage appliances around their SAN OS called Data ONTAP. Data ONTAP along with WAFL filesystem comprise a dynamic storage appliance that allows simultaneous mounting of volumes into LUNs and NFS/CIFS shares. It also utilizes a technology call De-duplication that boasts up to 50% storage savings. With De-duplication be assured that your data is only stored once and never duplicated. NetApp also provides leader performance replication with their SnapMirror technology. With three different levels of replication, all needs within the data center are met while boosting performance.
NetApp integrates directly with Windows, Linux, VMware and provides unparalleled snapshot capabilities. With NetApp snapshots are a trivial matter and up to 256 snapshots can be made per volume. NetApp provides software extensions to their appliances for SQL, Exchange, and VMware, to name a few. With NetApp technology data storage and backup has become an almost trivial task when compared to the legacy backup systems of the past.
With NetApps’s virtual center plug-in, you can now manage your NetApp applicance from the same interface you manage your virtual environment. In addition, NetApp provides Site Recovery Adapters to work with VMware Site Recovery Manager greatly reducing the complexity of deploying a disaster recovery design.