Santhosh D’Souza, Director -Systems Engineer, NetApp India, discusses with KTP Radhika, SDS and its features, benefits of NetApp’s recently launched clustered data ONTAP solution and trends in the storage space. Excerpts…
Over the past few months, software defined storage (SDS) has become a catch word in the storage industry. What benefits does it offer to enterprises?
SDS pools hardware storage resources and allows them to be programmatically defined, provisioned and managed in the software. This design provides the means for storage services to be provisioned and consumed based on policies and deployed on a wide range of hardware spanning vendor optimized to commodity to cloud.
Recently NetApp announced its new version of storage OS, clustered data ONTAP solution. How does it deliver more capacity to organizations?
We are proud to launch a new version of our flagship storage operating system – clustered data ONTAP. It gives IT organizations and service providers the capability to rapidly and cost effectively deliver new services and capacity, with no downtime. Clustered data ONTAP paves the way for customers deploying software-defined data centers, which cut through the performance, availability and efficiency limits of traditional hardware-silo models.
The SDS approach pioneered by the new OS focuses on agility in delivery of IT services to application owners while improving operational and resource efficiency. It is the first storage and data management solution that meets the SDS criteria of resources defined in software, provisioned based on policy and deployable on multi vendor hardware platform.
Our customers used to tell us that they require their IT infrastructure to be more responsive to their business, allowing them to make rapid and more informed decisions. Enabling technologies, such as virtualization and private/public clouds offer improved levels of agility and efficiency and require storage solutions that can deliver the full value of next generation data centers built on a shared virtual infrastructure.
Clustered data ONTAP provides the optimal storage environment for enterprises of all sizes. Some of the benefits that clustered data ONTAP brings to a variety of our customers across the manufacturing, BFSI and ITES verticals include, improved IT operations and accelerated business-critical application performance, reduced risk and increased agility; by standardizing on a single unified clustered architecture, which scales easily and adapts to the business needs. It also provides high return on investment resulting from an efficient infrastructure for workloads or tenants that have different performance and security requirements.
According to you what are the technology and market trends that are driving adoption of the clustered data ONTAP in India?
Today’s competitive environment means that enterprises are facing a tremendous increase in the amount of data used to conduct their everyday business, driven largely by the explosion of unstructured data. IT managers know that applications using and storing video, audio, images, research sets and other large digital files and unstructured data are pushing the boundaries of traditional storage system capacity and performance.
Clustered data ONTAP is an effective response to this explosive data and the paradigm shifts to scale out architecture. It allows customers to plan their data center around their data rather than their hardware equipment. As the hardware ages, data can be transparently migrated to newer hardware without disruption to data access. This non-disruptive operation level is essential in today’s round the clock environment and results into improved economics as well as operational efficiency. The trend towards non-disruptive operations, coupled with proven efficiency, massive scalability, uncompromised performance with the management ease has created a ground-swell for clustered data ONTAP amongst enterprises and service providers.
Please shed some light on NetApp’s business plans in India.
Netapp is targeting customers across enterprise, mid-market, IT/ITeS and government segments, while addressing all industry verticals. We currently have over 1,000 customers and around 5,500 systems installed. With presence across key verticals, and the clustered data ONTAP announcement, our addressable market and opportunities will further grow. We will also continue to follow a 100% channel-based model.
