Press release:

NetApp Simplifies Storage and Data Management with Support for Windows Server 2012

Public, Private, and Hybrid Cloud Migration Accelerated by Microsoft and NetApp Technology Integration

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Sept. 4, 2012 — Trends toward greater virtualization of IT infrastructure, increased levels of content digitization, faster levels of IT service deployment, and continued service-level availability expectations are driving increased interest in cloud computing. This period of transformation from physical to virtual infrastructures, and then to secure private, public, and hybrid clouds, offers new opportunities for IT professionals to deliver agile, on-demand services built on a flexible pool of shared compute, network, and storage resources.

In close collaboration with technology leaders such as NetApp, Microsoft is unveiling a new Windows Server release to help accelerate this transition. Today, NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) announced support for Windows Server 2012 with storage solutions for server and desktop virtualization, storage and availability, Web and application platform development, and private cloud deployment. For organizations of any size and in any industry, this close collaboration simplifies and accelerates how storage is pooled, provisioned, accessed, and managed in Windows environments.

In June, NetApp was named Microsoft Private Cloud Partner of the Year for 2012 in recognition of its commitment to helping organizations move to private cloud solutions. For more than 10 years, NetApp and Microsoft have teamed to develop and provide innovative storage and data management solutions for Microsoft technologies. Today more than 25,000 enterprise customers worldwide store, protect, and manage their Microsoft application data with NetApp® storage solutions.

"Windows Server 2012 is the category benchmark for organizations looking to migrate rapidly to cloud-ready infrastructures for application and service delivery," said Phil Brotherton, vice president, Enterprise Software Ecosystem, NetApp. "To help organizations realize the full value of their Microsoft technology investments, we continue to align our solution delivery roadmaps to address the critical challenges our mutual customers are facing, from increasing storage efficiency to maintaining high availability of servers, applications, and services."

"Windows Server 2012 is built from the ground up to be cloud ready and delivers important storage enhancements to help organizations reduce costs and achieve a whole new level of business agility," said Thomas Pfenning, general manager, File Server Foundation, Microsoft. "We’ve worked closely with NetApp with a focus on giving our mutual customers an efficient, flexible, and reliable IT foundation for delivering business-critical services."

NetApp Supports Windows Server 2012 Capabilities

NetApp offers the following support for key capabilities of Windows Server 2012:

• Storage. NetApp FAS and V-Series storage systems have been thoroughly tested, and are fully supported with Windows Server 2012, which means compatibility and confident deployment of applications. NetApp is committed to providing support for SMB 3.0 and Windows ODX — file storage and data transfer technologies used in Windows Server 2012 storage environments — and is launching a public beta program for this support in October 2012. For more information about this program, go tocommunities.netapp.com/groups/ontap-82-beta-program. NetApp is committed to making data storage and data movement easier by providing storage protocol choices (including support for FCP, FCoE, and iSCSI) that can make server consolidation and virtualization easier, enabling additional cost savings, greater storage efficiency, increased utilization, and simpler high-availability and disaster recovery solutions. NetApp is also a partner member of the Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track program and is developing prevalidated solutions for Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V on the NetApp and Cisco FlexPod® architecture managed with Microsoft System Center 2012 SP1.
• Server and desktop virtualization. NetApp Snapshot™ based backup and recovery with SnapManager for Hyper-V 1.2 and SnapDrive® for Windows 6.5 have achieved Windows Server 2012 logo certification and provide integrated data protection in Windows Server 2012 environments, speeding backup, restore, and disaster recovery operations in Microsoft Private Cloud and Hyper-V environments. NetApp’s support for the updated Clustered Shared Volumes in Windows Server 2012 and the new VHDx specification significantly reduce consumption of server and storage system resources, enabling large-scale virtualization and private cloud deployments. For desktop virtualization, NetApp storage systems offer an innovative set of features for efficient, reliable, and scalable VDI deployments, including deduplication, zero-space cloning, Flash Cache, and automation.
• Reduced infrastructure for cloud. With delivery expected later this year, a NetApp reference architecture built with Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 SP1 will tightly integrate with NetApp FAS data storage systems and V-Series open storage systems running NetApp Data ONTAP®. This validated architecture is structured to reduce application deployment times; increase utilization of virtual and physical resource pools; and provide end-to-end interoperability of compute, storage, and network resources in conjunction with the release of Microsoft System Center 2012 SP1.
• Management and automation. For private cloud implementations, NetApp OnCommand® Plug-in for Microsoft 3.2 is designed to provide integration with Microsoft System Center 2012 SP1 for dynamic scalability, automated workflow, on-demand self-service, and infrastructure orchestration in conjunction with the release of the updated management suite for Windows Server 2012 by Microsoft.
• Web and application platform. NetApp provides comprehensive support for application platforms on Windows Server 2012, including support of SQL Server 2012 data protection with SnapManager® 6.0 for SQL Server.

Additional Resources

• For more information about NetApp support for Microsoft: www.netapp.com/microsoftsolutions
• Follow NetApp on Twitter: www.twitter.com/NetApp
• Get the latest on NetApp culture: www.facebook.com/NetAppCulture
• Join NetApp on Facebook: www.facebook.com/NetApp
• View NetApp videos on YouTube: www.youtube.com/NetAppTV
• Connect with NetApp on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/groups?about=&gid=111681

About NetApp
NetApp creates innovative storage and data management solutions that deliver outstanding cost efficiency and accelerate business breakthroughs. Our commitment to living our core values and consistently being recognized as a great place to work around the world are fundamental to our long-term growth and success, as well as the success of our pathway partners and customers. Discover our passion for helping companies around the world go further, faster at www.netapp.com.

Customers Transform IT with VMware vCloud®

VMware News Releases

Customers Transform IT with VMware vCloud®

VMware and Service Providers Enable Customers Across Industries to Successfully Accelerate Delivery of Reliable, High-Performance Secure Clouds

PALO ALTO, Calif., Aug. 22, 2012 — VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, today announced continued momentum of its customers deploying public and hybrid clouds based on VMware cloud solutions. VMware vCloud® technologies and cloud services enable customers to achieve a wide range of business benefits such as reduced IT costs, improved security and increased flexibility.

"VMware customers are looking to deploy reliable, high-performance, secure clouds that are compatible with their existing applications and datacenter operations. VMware and its partners are uniquely positioned to deliver this,” said Mathew Lodge, vice president, cloud services, VMware. “Today VMware has the broadest cloud ecosystem and the rapid adoption of vCloud services  by customers – triple digit growth in year-over-year VSPP bookings in 2011 and 2012 to date -- is a true testament to the value that the vCloud ecosystem delivers.”

VMware and its service providers cater to a variety of use cases ranging from compute resources for pre-production environments to seasonal and transient workloads to disaster recovery in the cloud. VMware customers who have recently adopted cloud computing to transform their IT environments include Columbia Sportswear Company, eMix (Electronic Medical Information Exchange), Star Alliance and Subaru of America, Inc.

Columbia Sportswear Company
Based in Portland, Oregon, Columbia Sportswear is the worldwide leader in outerwear, sportswear apparel and accessories and has over 4,000 employees and 50 locations. Nearly 100 percent virtualized, Columbia Sportswear first looked to the public cloud to have the option of moving workloads outside the facility to prevent downtime during disasters or datacenter moves. They wanted the flexibility to move workloads seamlessly from their private cloud to their vCloud-based ecosystem provider. 

Two real-life scenarios that Columbia experienced reinforced the need for a cloud model centered on the Japanese tsunami in 2011, which caused continuous power outages to their Tokyo-based facility. First, had a cloud model been in place, the ability to move the data out of the region temporarily would have improved operations and allowed for local staff to access their data remotely. Second, office and datacenter moves shouldn’t necessarily affect access to data and therefore, the need to temporarily park workloads somewhere else without disruption would have allowed for greater productivity. Columbia Sportswear now moves workloads seamlessly from their private cloud to their vCloud provider, having control of where workloads live.

 “We are very pleased with how easy it has been to deploy VMware vCloud to meet our rapidly growing business requirements, allowing us to scale instantly and reduce infrastructure costs,” said Michael Leeper, senior manager, global IT engineering, Columbia Sportswear Company.

eMix
Tasked with providing a highly available, secure platform for hospital providers to share medical information, eMix is replacing the need for CDs, DVDs and VPN connections, bringing healthcare communications into the 21st century on the foundation of VMware vCloud.  eMix collaborated with iLand, 2012 “Global Service Provider Partner of the Year,” to build a public cloud solution that provides massive scalability as well as a holistic approach to security when exchanging medical imaging data between proprietary IT systems. One eMix customer reported an average savings of $14,000- $18,000 per emergency room visit as a result of the cloud.

“The importance of having VMware compatibility and the need to partner with a service provider that can address HIPAA compliancy was a priority when considering a cloud solution,” said Florent Saint-Clair, vice president, corporate development, DR Systems and general manager, eMix (division of DR Systems). “With VMware’s vCloud solution the adoption curve has been accelerating tremendously, and we expect that the growth over the past two years, which was from zero to five hundred customers, will accelerate even further.”

VMware customers to share their cloud stories at VMworld
IT executives from Fortune 1000 and mid-market companies using VMware vCloud will gather on stage at VMworld in San Francisco, Calif. on Aug. 27, 2012 at 2:30 PM to discuss why they chose a hybrid cloud solution and share their use cases and deployment outcomes, including infrastructure, security, provider selection, and results. The session, “Industry Leaders Share the Impact of Their Cloud Deployments (session CSM2258),” will be moderated by Paul Strong, CTO, global customer and field initiatives, VMware and will be open to audience questions. Register here to attend this session at VMworld San Francisco.

VMware Service Provider Program (VSPP) and vCloud Services
The VMware Service Provider Program (VSPP) is for partners offering cloud computing and hosted IT services built on VMware cloud infrastructure. There are over 8,500 partners in the program to date.

VMware vCloud Services offer a broad array of VMware-compatible infrastructure clouds built on a secure platform and delivered by vCloud service providers, enabling customers to easily extend, manage and scale their datacenter workloads to a public cloud. With more than 150 certified VMware vCloud Services in 29 countries, VMware and VSPP partners together form the number two public cloud ecosystem in the world. 
 
Additional Resources

• Learn more about how customers are using VMware vCloud on Another VMware Cloud
• Learn more about the vCloud ecosystem
• Read the VMware vCloud Blogfor the latest information on VMware vCloud
• Follow VMware vCloud on Twitter @vCloud

About VMware
VMware is the leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions that enable businesses to thrive in the Cloud Era. Customers rely on VMware to help them transform the way they build, deliver and consume Information Technology resources in a manner that is evolutionary and based on their specific needs. With 2011 revenues of $3.77 billion, VMware has more than 350,000 customers and 50,000 partners. The company is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the world and can be found online at www.vmware.com.

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Press release:

Proving Consistency for Applications Across a Hybrid Cloud

August 20, 2012

Cloud Computing Team

Write once, deploy anywhere. That's the goal of application writers everywhere. But how to bring such portability to hybrid clouds given that underlying infrastructure can differ markedly between on-premise platforms and public clouds or even between different public cloud providers?

Portability is closely related to other aspects of cloud openness, such as open source and open standards. Without freedom from being locked into business practices and technology roadmaps of a specific proprietary vendor, you certainly won't have portability. Without being able to deploy on the infrastructure of your choice, you don't have portability. Without open and extensible APIs, you can't have portability.

In a hybrid cloud environment, Red Hat augments portability by providing consistent runtime environments across private and public clouds. With access to products such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware on public clouds, you can run the exact same certified Red Hat software on the platform you choose.

This means, for example, that your developers can write and test software in a public cloud environment and then deploy the application on-premise without needing to worry about differences between the development and the production runtime environment. Or you may decide that an application developed and deployed on-premise is a good candidate for moving to a public cloud; perhaps its resource requirements vary a lot over time and pay-as-you-go utility pricing is consequently a better fit than buying physical assets.

But Red Hat does more to enable the use of products such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware in public clouds than simply providing interoperability APIs, the ability to run a Red Hat Enterprise Linux image and other technical features. Business and operational models need to be in place as well. How do you get updates, for example? How do you manage entitlements? These are technical challenges. But they also have business and operational aspects. We've been working to address them as part of the Red Hat Certified Cloud Provider (CCP) program.

The program's goal is to offer trusted destinations for customers, ISVs and partners where they can access and consume Red Hat technologies in public clouds. CCPs meet technical and certification requirements that provide for safe, supported, scalable and consistent destinations for enterprise cloud deployments.

A key aspect of the program is offering consistency between Red Hat technologies that are provided directly from Red Hat and consumed on-premise, and those Red Hat product offerings that a cloud provider makes available. A runtime within a public cloud environment that is consistent with on-premise environments greatly aids application portability. Because the same runtime spans physical servers, multiple virtualization platforms and public clouds, applications need only be certified and tested once and then run on the infrastructure of choice.

The CCP program provides a variety of additional benefits to end users. Using a Red Hat-certified cloud provides access to a broad ecosystem of enterprise-quality proven Red Hat Cloud Providers, enabling customers to select from a wide spectrum of business terms, service levels and global locations. They gain the ability to purchase Red Hat products on a consumption (pay-as-you-go) basis that can be a good match for spiky or unpredictable workloads. They get timely access to the latest updates and versions of Red Hat products through a Red Hat Update Infrastructure at the provider. These providers offer enterprise support—backed by Red Hat. And with select Red Hat Premier-Certified Cloud Providers, they can transfer their software subscriptions back and forth from on-premise, a feature called Red Hat Cloud Access.

Of course, enterprise customers still should perform their own due diligence to ensure that the processes and protections offered by a public cloud provider meets their specific security, compliance and regulatory requirements. For example, they may need to ensure that a cloud provider isn’t storing customer data in a locale not meeting government mandates for that type of data. However, the CCP provides a significant level of confidence with respect to the maintenance of their Red Hat environment.

The certification program associated with CCPs is not unlike what Red Hat does with hardware certification. Can Red Hat Enterprise Linux run in that environment? Can you start it? Can you enable and disable SELinux just like you can on-premise? Does it have all the drivers that are needed to work?

It's also about maintaining the integrity of the Red Hat subscription in those situations. One key piece of technology is that all of the Red Hat Certified Cloud Providers are using an in-cloud update service. When you start images, they're automatically entitled to where they can access this update service immediately, and get the additional Red Hat Enterprise Linux packages they may need. Furthermore, they receive needed updates on the fly. It really becomes a seamless environment with Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the public cloud following the same operational model that it does on-premise.

Building hybrid clouds that span heterogeneous on- and off-premise resources requires an open approach. So that's the approach taken by Red Hat across its entire cloud portfolio. But providing consistency for applications across hybrid environments requires even more. It takes consistent environments on which applications can run. But even that's not enough. It takes business relationships and technology to make the experience of running applications in a hybrid environment consistent as well. And that's the challenge that the Red Hat Certified Cloud Provider Program takes on.

News Release from CA Technologies - Hybrid Data Protection to SMBs

New CA ARCserve D2D On Demand Delivers Fast, Cost-Effective Hybrid Data Protection to SMBs

Flexible SaaS Solution Combines Local Backup Speed With Windows Azure Cloud Storage

ISLANDIA, NY, February 23, 2012 – CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) today announced CA ARCserve® D2D On Demand, a hybrid software-as-a-service (SaaS) data protection and disaster recovery solution that enables small businesses to meet demanding backup windows while protecting the integrity and availability of critical systems, applications and information.

Unlike solutions that only provide local protection or only back up directly to the cloud, CA ARCserve D2D On Demand combines on-premise resources for fast backup and bare-metal recovery capabilities with Windows Azure™ cloud storage for secure offsite protection and archiving of critical files.  This hybrid approach enables SMBs to successfully protect their relentlessly growing volume of data within limited budget constraints.

"Now that SMBs are experiencing the same intensive proliferation of high-value data as their enterprise counterparts, they are in desperate need of a backup solution that is fast, scalable, easy to implement, richly functional and priced right," said Steve Fairbanks, vice president, Data Management, CA Technologies.  "CA ARCserve D2D On Demand uniquely delivers on these key criteria by leveraging the inherent strengths of both on-premise and cloud models—enabling SMB customers to quickly and easily achieve their data protection objectives."

Utilizing patent-pending Infinite Incremental (I2) Technology™, CA ARCserve D2D On Demand enables companies to conduct frequent backups with minimal impact on storage resources, processing power and network bandwidth.  Users can quickly restore files, application data, volumes or entire systems—even to dissimilar hardware or virtual environments—from a single snapshot backup. 

Through a central web portal users and partners can easily obtain information on when the last backup occurred, total number of machines licensed, amount of time and storage remaining on the contract, and many other helpful resources for managing the subscription account.

Offsite data storage is particularly important for protecting organizations against local disasters, such as fires or floods.

“Windows Azure offers a compelling value proposition in terms of cost, elasticity, security and reliability,” said Walid Abu-Hadba, corporate vice president, Developer & Platform Evangelism Group, Microsoft.  “CA ARCserve D2D On Demand offers a great way of using the power of Windows Azure to make disk-to-disk backup much easier and less expensive.”

CA ARCserve D2D On Demand is sold exclusively through the channel as a comprehensive, turnkey managed service—allowing customers to treat backup as a fixed operational cost, rather than requiring both high capital expenditure and indeterminate ongoing ownership costs.  The seamless inclusion of Windows Azure cloud storage also spares customers and partners the burden of engineering their own integration with cloud infrastructure or contracting separately with a cloud storage-as-a-service provider.

“It is essential for us to rigorously protect our IT environment—but the cost and hassle of backing up to tape, storing tapes offsite, and properly cataloging them for possible emergency restoration is impractical,” said Tyler Rast, general manager and vice president of operation at Beehive Brick & Stone, a large masonry products provider in Utah.  “With CA ARCserve D2D On Demand, we now get fast, reliable off-site protection of our critical data on a straightforward subscription basis that keeps our costs low and predictable.”

CA ARCserve D2D On Demand is offered through monthly or annual subscription licensing that includes 25GB of Windows Azure cloud storage per protected machine.  Additional cloud storage is available in tiered capacity bands.  Customers can pool their purchased cloud storage resources and share them among protected machines. 

CA ARCserve D2D On Demand is also an ideal solution for MSPs seeking to include turnkey data protection offerings in their cloud services portfolios.

“In addition to its technical excellence, CA ARCserve D2D On Demand is designed to flawlessly handle usage reporting and billing for MSPs re-selling cloud backup,” said Vinny DiSpigno, CEO of Webistix, Inc., a New York-based MSP.  “We expect this to be a great way for us to generate recurring revenue stream with minimal upfront investment.”

Resources:

• CA ARCserve D2D On Demand product page• Product Brief: Five Things You Should Know• Whitepaper: The Hybrid Cloud Approach: CA ARCserve D2D On Demand• ARCserve.com