Enterprise Application Solutions

Oracle:

NetApp solutions for Oracle provide increased performance and data agility in the cloud, and eliminate planned downtime.

NetApp solutions for Oracle Database deliver consistent high performance, availability, and data protection. NetApp Oracle solutions reduce IT and business costs and complexity, while helping Oracle Database applications to perform better—both in the cloud and in the data center.

90% of all database performance issues can be traced to the storage tier. Reduce latency during peak loads, and boost Oracle Database performance where you need it most, by using NetApp All Flash FAS or EF-Series all-flash storage systems.

NetApp clustered Data ONTAP storage operating system’s data migration software enables dynamic workload balancing. Optimize I/O without affecting users or applications, and eliminate planned downtime. Clustered Data ONTAP nondisruptive storage operations and scalability create an ideal Oracle RAC platform. Our Snapshot technology backs up and restores data in a fraction of the time and space of traditional methods, for faster application development and increased business agility.

NetApp storage scales Oracle performance without limits, so you can meet your growing database application needs.

The Challenge

Oracle databases drive business-critical applications and are key to the success of countless data-driven enterprises like yours. Your service goals include a responsive, uninterrupted experience for employees, customers, and partners accessing Oracle data. You need an infrastructure for Oracle that can deliver consistently high levels of performance, data availability, and data protection while meeting your operational cost guidelines.

Your database team needs a storage infrastructure that’s responsive enough to facilitate, not inhibit database performance. In addition, the explosive growth of database instances and the critical data they house creates a variety of management challenges, from provisioning and cloning to backup and disaster recovery. Without automated management tools that integrate databases with underlying storage, DBAs can’t respond to rapidly changing business needs.

Your storage teams are under pressure to provide an infrastructure that exceeds user expectations while driving out complexity and capital and operating inefficiencies. The infrastructure must remain up and running, meet performance and availability SLAs, and provide ample resources to accommodate rapidly expanding database environments without wasted capacity.

Together, your IT teams need a highly efficient, integrated solution to eliminate these issues and deliver superior IT services for Oracle databases.

The Solution

Address your biggest database challenges with an agile data infrastructure. The NetApp solution for Oracle database delivers industry leading storage, unprecedented scalability, continuous data access, and automated data management for immediate response to business opportunities.

NetApp has worked with Oracle for years, developing innovative, integrated solutions that reduce IT and business costs and complexity. NetApp leads the way with data storage offering compelling solutions for Oracle database.

Infinite scalability:

• Scalable performance flexibility to match changing database needs with NetApp Data ONTAP 8
• Assured nonstop performance and availability to keep production databases up and running with clustered Data ONTAP 8
• Optimized database transactions with synergy between Oracle partitions and NetApp Flash Cache™

Immortal operations:

• Eliminate planned downtime with transparent, nondisruptive mobility of applications and data
• Avoid unnecessary business database outages during storage maintenance operations by using clustered Data ONTAP with DataMotion™
• Match the scalability and availability characteristics of Oracle RAC at the storage layers

Intelligent management:

• Provide higher data availability with simple, reliable, and much faster disk-based backup and recovery for databases
• Experience efficient, affordable, and proven DR and business continuity solution
• Double DBA productivity with superior integrated Oracle recovery capabilities

Performance Agility

Storage is the most important performance factor in database environments. 90% of database performance issues in both physical and virtual infrastructures can be traced to the storage tier. Your database storage needs to deliver sustained performance for multiple Oracle instances and quickly optimize I/O as peak workloads change to avoid business impact.

NetApp storage scales Oracle performance nondisruptively, without limits. The NetApp FAS series with Data ONTAP 8 offers a variety of innovations designed for multiprotocol, high-performance databases. For example, NetApp collaborated with Oracle to design a Direct NFS (DNFS) connectivity solution for customers using the NFS protocol. DNFS provides the same performance and latency characteristics of FC/FCoE for Oracle databases. As a result, customers gain the flexibility to select or change their network connectivity model as their Oracle database infrastructure evolves.

NetApp Data ONTAP with DataMotion enables you to dynamically balance workloads to maintain or enhance performance to meet new database service levels. Ineffective load balancing often results in storage hotspots associated with overloaded volumes, which can dramatically affect database performance. Clustered Data ONTAP with DataMotion solves this issue effortlessly by transparently moving the affected volumes to different storage aggregates or nodes without affecting users or applications.

Low storage latency is critical for highperformance OLTP workloads. NetApp storage can reduce latency by a factor of 10 or more. You can also increase I/O throughput by 78% with NetApp Flash Cache, a deduplication-aware read cache for hot blocks of Oracle transaction data. Flash Cache provides a virtual storage tier without the additional cost and complexity of an additional physical storage tier. NetApp Flash Pool technology further enhances performance by enabling SSDs and HDDs to be pooled and automatically optimizes I/O by moving data across multiple tiers. Finally, to make sure individual databases get appropriate QoS from storage resources in multi-tenancy environments, NetApp provides FlexShare capability to make sure Oracle database performance is not compromised by other storage activities.

The online nondisruptive capability of Data ONTAP 8 makes it a smart choice for a scalable storage platform for Oracle infrastructure.

NetApp solution for Oracle database.

Eliminate Downtime with Nondisruptive Operations

NetApp clustered Data ONTAP 8 enables nondisruptive storage operations and scalability, providing an ideal 24/7 storage platform for your Oracle RAC database. The addition of transparent volume migration between clustered storage systems results in zero impact or downtime to running databases, eliminating a potential weak link in your database infrastructure.

In addition to the nondisruptive operations of Data ONTAP 8, NetApp OnCommand® Insight Balance provides key performance indicators (KPIs), early warning signs of storage infrastructure contention, and guidance for resolution of issues to assist in maintaining availability SLAs.

Backup, Recovery, and DR Simplicity

The time and expense related to backup and recovery in Oracle environments are growing. The challenge to DBAs is also increasing with the growing size and complexity of databases that must be managed and recovered more quickly. To remain competitive, DBAs and storage administrators must be able to complete backups and restores more quickly and reliably.

DBAs must minimize the chance of data loss and increase the availability of Oracle systems. The NetApp integrated data protection (IDP) solution, specifically designed for Oracle, can reduce DBA time by 50%. NetApp empowers storage teams and DBAs with access to storage technologies and protection services powered by Snapshot™ technology, which enables fast, frequent backups and restores of large databases in a fraction of the time and space of traditional methods. NetApp IDP has become the fastest, easiest, and most efficient method to back up, recover, clone, and provide disaster recovery of Oracle databases.

Achieve Your Goals with Industry-Leading Efficiency

NetApp enables maximum data storage and operational efficiencies while minimizing complexity and resources to drive down costs. NetApp efficiency technologies are driven by innovation, including Snapshot technology, FlexClone, SnapMirror, SnapVault, Data ONTAP compression, FlexVol, RAID-DP, and Flash Cache.

An internal study showed how Flash Cache, which drives down the number of drives required for many workloads, achieved superior Oracle performance with 50% more available capacity, 66% less power, and 59% less rack space, driving down the overall TCO of NetApp storage.

In addition to storage efficiency, NetApp’s core technologies make Oracle data management simple and time efficient. You can enable efficient thin provisioning and reallocation of Oracle storage with NetApp FlexVol. Leverage SnapManager for Oracle and FlexClone to simplify and automate the database cloning and refresh process with practically no extra storage needed, no time-consuming approval loops, and in 97% less time. Customers such as Blackboard have reduced cloning process time for development and test environments from 37 hours down to just 1 hour.

The ability to do so much more with so much less physical storage is a strong competitive advantage of which NetApp customers are taking advantage to meet their efficiency goals with greater flexibility. Why manage complexity when you can eliminate it with NetApp?

Partner for Success

NetApp Storage Design and Implementation Service for Oracle enables you to quickly and reliably achieve production readiness for your NetApp Oracle environment:

• Streamline your deployment for clustered Data ONTAP
• Implement quickly by using proven methodologies and best practices
• Lower risk with verification testing, documentation and postimplementation review
• Free up your internal resources so they can focus on other strategic projects

Database Solutions

The NetApp Solution for Oracle Database lets you deploy and manage databases faster and ensures predictable performance.

The NetApp Solution for Oracle Database helps you provide a responsive, uninterrupted experience for users of applications running on Oracle Database in traditional deployments, in clustered environments, or in the cloud. We provide efficient, integrated solutions that facilitate database performance and enable you to respond to changing business needs.

NetApp Solution for Oracle Database 
A collection of products, technologies, reference architectures, and services that enables you to accelerate deployments, performance, and manageability to support applications that run on Oracle Database.

Oracle Database 12c Integration 
Technologies, reference architectures, and services that speed deployment, performance, and manageability for Oracle Database applications.

FlexPod Solutions

Use FlexPod Solutions for Oracle environments to deliver fast database application performance in less time.

Leverage FlexPod Solutions for Oracle environments to deliver improved database application performance. We test and validate the infrastructure and supporting software components in our FlexPod solutions for Oracle, so that you can deploy your database applications with greater confidence, and in less time than when they are based on traditional infrastructure implementations.

For Oracle Databases that require the highest transaction rates with the lowest latency, you can achieve more than two million IOPS at sub-millisecond latency by using FlexPod Select for High Performance Oracle RAC. And because FlexPod implementations are designed with balanced configuration across the IT stack, you can scale your supporting infrastructure with ease as your application workload changes.

We offer the following FlexPod Solutions for Oracle workloads:

• FlexPod Select for High Performance Oracle RAC
• FlexPod Datacenter with Oracle RAC on Oracle Linux

Managebility

NetApp offers integration and manageability products to make your Oracle environment faster and more reliable.

NetApp Oracle Manageability Solutions let you simplify, standardize, automate and improve data protection without diminishing performance.

Data Protection 
Achieve higher data availability and affordable disaster recovery. Protect all of your Oracle applications.

• SnapManager for Oracle
• Snap Creator Framework
• SnapProtect
• NetApp Media Management Library for Oracle RMAN

Development and Test 
Create space-efficient copies of your Oracle databases in minutes. Develop and deploy new applications faster.

• SnapManager for Oracle
• NetApp Cloning Plug-in for Oracle Multitenant Database
• NetApp Media Management Library for Oracle RMAN

Monitoring 
Consolidate information and help pinpoint storage related database problems, increase operational efficiencies.

• NetApp FAS Plug-in for Oracle Enterprise Manager
• NetApp SANtricity Plug-in for Oracle Enterprise Manager
• NetApp Plugin for Oracle VM

SAP:

Deploy, scale out, and upgrade SAP applications faster. NetApp solutions enable agile, virtualized SAP infrastructures.

The NetApp storage portfolio—including E-Series, flash, and the Data ONTAP storage operating system—provides a unified, scalable, high-performance, and always-on storage infrastructure for SAP applications. Our portfolio responds on demand and increases your SAP operational efficiency.

Lower your SAP storage and data management costs by up to 50% by using SAP applications built on NetApp. Maximize your virtualized SAP infrastructure and start your private cloud with FlexPod Datacenter for SAP Applications.

Get a high-performance, scalable SAP HANA infrastructure either through an SAP HANA appliance model, on your choice of a Cisco or a Fujitsu platform, or by leveraging the portfolio of NetApp storage solutions that have been certified for the SAP HANA Tailored Datacenter Integration (TDI) model.

The Challenge

The typical SAP environment consists of multiple SAP Business Applications using SAP NetWeaver® components hosted on reliable information databases serviced from networked storage. As your SAP landscape continues to grow and morph to support more and more business-critical processes and business events, your storage infrastructure needs to facilitate these changes. Included with these changes are processes such as keeping SAP software up to date, managing data migrations, releasing new business process changes, and backing up and protecting data along the way, which have become business processes in themselves. Today’s business climate demands higher efficiency and always-on access from the supporting SAP infrastructure while retaining the ability to rapidly respond to changing business needs. For example, the right storage platform better enables initiatives to include scaling number of instances during upgrades, replatforming to a virtualized infrastructure to meet efficiency initiatives, supporting 24x7 global access to SAP applications with no impact from maintenance windows, and enabling administrators to spend less time with data management administration. Choosing an appropriate shared storage infrastructure to facilitate these initiatives and meet future scalability needs is a great first step from today’s project- and application-based silo infrastructure.

Further, with richer and more data entering the SAP landscape, accommodating this data growth in a scalable manner requires a more agile data infrastructure. This data growth, which provides critical business intelligence information to your business, is also unfortunately slowing down the creation of SAP environments. This delay impedes the rollout of business process change, typically due to the traditional process for recreating secondary instances of SAP production databases. Likewise, enterprise organizations must have regulatory compliance programs and archival storage in place for SAP archival data, which adds to the storage management challenges.

Simply put, the major opportunities for improvement are:

• Minimize risk, downtime, and costs of SAP application lifecycle events such as migrations
• Provide responsive and nondisruptive operational environment for customers and partners through transparent movement of applications, data volumes, and network connections
• Achieve consistently high levels of data availability and data protection within the IT infrastructure while meeting your operational cost guidelines
• Drive out complexity, inflexibility, and storage inefficiencies, which create unnecessary costs and hinder the speed of SAP applications’ supported business process change
• Provide seamless path toward a multitenant private cloud infrastructure ready for SAP

The Solution

NetApp and SAP have developed an innovative solution that has assisted hundreds of customers to reduce the cost and complexity of their IT environment for SAP landscapes. The SAP Applications built on NetApp solution, depicted in Figure 1, enables your IT organization to address your key needs as proven with our thousands of customers leveraging a combination of NetApp and SAP landscape infrastructure to provide business IT services. The complete NetApp for SAP solution delivers the following.

For your SAP basis and application teams, it provides the ability to:

• Innovate and accelerate your SAP Applications lifecycle
  • Achieve faster time to market for critical SAP application upgrades and projects by innovating around delays with NetApp Snapshot, FlexClone, and SnapManager for SAP for multiple SAP copies
  • Integrate with SAP Landscape Virtualization Management (LVM) to manage and automate SAP system copies, and SAP Test Data Migration Server (TDMS) to enable parallel development, QA, and training processes
  • Accelerate efficiency of your application development teams and reduce test cycles from months to weeks for SAP migrations using NetApp FlexClone
  • Deliver continuous access to information databases using NetApp Data ONTAP with Cluster-Mode and DataMotion for Volumes
  • Attain the ability to dynamically expand both performance and capacity by adding more SAP applications, with Data ONTAP 9, as your business needs change

SAP applications built on NetApp.

For your infrastructure teams, NetApp provides the ability to:

• Leverage a reliable, agile data platform for business applications with NetApp Data ONTAP 9
  • Deliver higher SAP application uptime SLAs with the operational flexibility to respond to events, data growth, and performance needs effortlessly and non-disruptively
  • Maximize budget usage with a consolidated storage platform that provides high levels of application performance and unprecedented data and management efficiencies for SAP landscapes
  • Minimize business data loss impact with a comprehensive recovery platform for SAP NetWeaver environments
• Deploy a secure multi-tenant solution with virtualization-ready efficiencies for lower cost SAP landscape implementations
  • Optimized to support running SAP applications in multi-tenant, virtualized clouds, including FlexPod for zero-risk deployment
  • Delivers capital and operational efficiency savings with best-in-class storage cloning and provisioning efficiencies requiring 50% to 90% less storage space. These capabilities are available in the SAP Applications built on FlexPod solution, a joint effort with NetApp, Cisco, and VMware

Accelerate your SAP landscape lifecycle

Essential activities such as SAP software upgrades, migrations, quality assurance, data integrity testing, and user training environments all require SAP system copies. The traditional process of creating and preparing SAP system copies, with a tape backup and restore process, is slow and consumes the time and resources of your SAP administration team unnecessarily. In addition, because these traditional SAP system copies are treated as full copies when created, they require significant onefor-one storage allocation. Delaying rollout of business impactful SAP changes by waiting days for storage approvals and wait times for SAP system copies to complete is not competitive in today’s fast-paced business environment.

With NetApp FlexClone technology, a space-efficient writable point-in-time Snapshot copy of a volume, your DBA and SAP basis teams can instantly clone full application environments in minutes and provide access to several copies of SAP instances for individual team members. Your IT staff can now test various changes, upgrades, or patch processes against those environments immediately to accelerate the application change management process and reduce change management risk dramatically. In addition, for customers who use SAP Test Data Migration Server (TDMS) for creation of secondary systems, FlexClone complements and enhances its capabilities. It avoids the core issue of production system impact when extracting those on-demand datasets. An additional benefit of the combined solution is the ability to provide additional clones of the TDMS created copy to as many groups and people as needed to meet project timelines with virtually no additional storage needed.

From the storage team perspective, they can take a hands-off approach as the space consumption by these copies is minimal in comparison and does not affect other storage consumers (Figure 2). The clone volume uses space very efficiently, allowing both the original FlexVol volume and the FlexClone volume to share common data, storing only the data that changes between the original volume and the clone. NetApp SnapManager for SAP software further enables this efficient clone creation in a matter of minutes, giving SAP administrators greater flexibility to create as many clones as needed, even with very large databases.

Space efficient SAP copies.

Even better, these NetApp technologies can be initiated and controlled from within SAP Landscape Virtualization Management (LVM). NetApp has provided the necessary integration with the new SAP LVM APIs to enable fewer interfaces, simplified intuitive administration for your SAP teams, and support for a more dynamic and fast-paced environment. With NetApp, provisioned volumes and SAP system copies are easily created on demand and disposed of to support faster development cycles, deliver upgrade projects on time, and deliver faster business process change required by business units today.

Reliable, agile data platform for SAP landscapes

Higher availability, predictable performance, and uptime expectations for your business-critical SAP IT services are becoming mandatory, while traditional mechanisms of backing up and protecting your SAP data have become unnecessary and inefficient business processes. What has been missing is a data center–ready efficient storage platform that ensures a non-disruptive operational environment while simplifying the data management challenge.

To make sure SAP business applications receive continuous access to information databases, NetApp provides several technologies, including NetApp Data ONTAP with Cluster-Mode and DataMotion for Volumes. You can leverage DataMotion for Volumes, a non-disruptive transparent volume migration feature, to avoid business application outages during storage maintenance operations. Applications remain online, and it maintains application transaction integrity and performance as the SAP volumes are migrated live between NetApp cluster storage nodes with zero impact on the application. This is especially pertinent for geographic users of these business applications, who normally are adversely affected with maintenance windows across the globe interrupting their daily revenue transactions.

With respect to protecting SAP data, companies want simpler data protection solutions that can lower their administrative and infrastructure costs and take advantage of disk-based storage efficiencies without adding additional overhead to IT teams. You can achieve this with NetApp integrated data protection specifically integrated for SAP environments, which has become the fastest, easiest, and most efficient method to back up, recover, clone, and provide disaster recovery for SAP databases and applications, including:

• Instantaneous and space-efficient application backups using Snapshot copies
• Rapid and granular restore and recovery using SnapRestore
• Secondary, protected backup copies using SnapVault
• Disaster recovery copies with thin replication SnapMirror
• Simple D2D or D2D2T backup and recovery management for application DBAs using NetApp SnapManager products, SnapProtect or Snap Creator
• Fast and space-efficient clones of SAP Business Applications using FlexClone
• Continuous data availability with MetroCluster

Faster SAP transactions, leaner databases, compliant adherence for growing SAP landscapes

When it comes to expanding both performance and capacity needs of SAP information infrastructure, storage is an important link in the performance chain. Your SAP basis team needs to have the ability to dynamically scale-up or scale-out and add SAP applications as business requirements change.

Secondly, long-term data accumulation in the SAP database affects application performance and availability. Deleting this data is not an option because some systems still require access to it. You also need to comply with strict regulations and corporate governance standards and protect your records against tampering and early deletion. This necessity calls for archiving data to a secure but accessible location and supporting your retention, indexing, auditing, privacy, and reporting requirements.

NetApp Data ONTAP 9 provides the crucial software and capabilities to adapt the performance and scalability characteristics to match your multiple SAP landscape needs. It provides your team with both capacity and processing performance scale-up and scale-out capabilities to match with the latest generation information databases. Performance and capacity gains to meet new service levels within the existing cluster can be achieved by nondisruptively migrating volumes to higher performance aggregates or different controllers using Cluster-Mode with DataMotion. Scaling up is achieved by adding disk arrays to existing controllers to increase IOPS and capacity. Additional and larger storage systems can be added to an existing storage cluster to meet scale-out demands. These capabilities support the addition of new SAP applications required for changing business conditions. For SAP online transaction workloads, storage latency is critical. NetApp provides the capability to reduce latency by a factor of 10 or more and increase I/O throughput by 78% by using NetApp Flash Cache. Flash Cache provides a secondary read cache for active blocks of SAP transaction data to attain those high levels of performance.

To keep SAP systems and applications at peak efficiency, SAP recommends data archiving to enhance performance and availability while reducing overhead, especially with databases larger than 1TB. The SAP Applications built on NetApp solution provides both online archival and compliance certified secondary storage for SAP applications, residing in separate partition or a secondary unified storage platform from NetApp. It keeps archived data easily and quickly accessible for audit, analysis, and ongoing business processes as opposed to archived on traditional tape archives. In addition, to comply with retention regulations, the NetApp SnapLock feature provides storage-enforced data retention with high-performance diskbased magnetic write once, read many (WORM) storage. It locks down important archived data and protects it against alteration, tampering, or early deletion according to policies managed by leading SAP archiving applications. This provides a hardened archiving infrastructure to meet the most stringent compliance requirements, as acknowledged by leading auditors while keeping your databases lean for today’s business data. In summary, NetApp is the leading storage platform for SAP when it comes to providing a flexible data platform that adjusts and delivers business information data to your applications constantly, enables quicker application lifecycles and change management, manages data growth, and protects all application data efficiently from unforeseen events.

SAP Applications Built On NetApp

SAP applications built on NetApp can lower your SAP storage and data management costs by up to 50%.

The SAP Applications built on NetApp solution has helped hundreds of organizations achieve an agile data infrastructure for their SAP landscapes.

The NetApp Data ONTAP 9 storage operating system delivers proven efficiency. Accelerate SAP application upgrades by making multiple SAP copies using NetApp Snapshot, FlexClone, and SnapManager for SAP technologies. Integrate with SAP LVM to manage and automate SAP system copies. Use FlexClone to reduce test cycles from months to weeks. Deliver continuous access to information databases using the NetApp clustered Data ONTAP OS.

An agile NetApp infrastructure for SAP applications enables you to run your business without disruption. Seamless and dynamic scalability lets you to expand both performance and capacity as your business needs change.

Consolidate your storage on NetApp Data ONTAP 9, gain reliability and ease of management, and maximize your budget.

FlexPod Datacenter for SAP

Maximize your virtualized SAP infrastructure and start your private cloud with FlexPod Datacenter for SAP.

Make a safe transition to the cloud. NetApp delivers the powerful FlexPod Datacenter platform for both traditional SAP applications and SAP HANA Tailored Datacenter Integration (TDI). The unified, pretested, and validated FlexPod Datacenter solution is built on a flexible and secure shared IT infrastructure using leading technology from NetApp, Cisco, and VMware.

FlexPod Datacenter improves business agility by providing application and data mobility and by accelerating SAP lifecycle management. Integrated data protection across the entire stack helps increase the availability of SAP systems in the cloud, and secure multi-tenancy delivers isolated SAP landscapes for various use cases.

Standardization and automation reduce the risks of running SAP landscapes in a cloud and contribute to overall lower TCO. The converged infrastructure at the core of the FlexPod Datacenter solution helps maximize efficiency and decrease costs through optimized asset utilization.

NetApp Solutions for SAP HANA Appliance

Get a high-performance, scalable SAP HANA appliance on a Cisco or Fujitsu platform with NetApp unified storage.

The SAP HANA in-memory database lets you process vast amounts of transactional, analytical, and application data in real-time using a computer’s main memory. NetApp solutions for SAP HANA ease your transition to this technology: Get a high-performance, scalable SAP HANA appliance right out of the box—with your choice of Cisco or Fujitsu platform.

Start with the storage infrastructure you need today and scale as demand rises. Our solutions deliver increased flexibility and infinite “building-block” scale-out capabilities. Correlate SAP HANA data with data from external systems—via a shared NetApp storage platform—to improve your decision-making.

With the integration of the NetApp Snap Creator Framework plug-in, NetApp provides data backup, restore, and recovery capabilities within seconds for SAP HANA. Protect your business data with ease and efficiency—without affecting overall system performance.

NetApp partners with Cisco and Fujitsu to deliver certified SAP HANA solutions validated with NetApp storage. You benefit from our combined technical expertise and support.

Solutions for SAP HANA Tailored Datacenter Integration (TDI)

Certified NetApp storage systems for SAP HANA TDI offer robust data management and protection.

NetApp offers a portfolio of data storage solutions certified for the SAP HANA Tailored Datacenter Integration (TDI) model. Look to certified NetApp FAS and E-Series storage systems for scalability, high availability, disaster recovery, and data protection. SAP HANA TDI has also been certified on the FlexPod Datacenter platform, providing flexibility and scalability without affecting SAP HANA TDI performance.

NetApp storage systems certified for SAP HANA TDI offer benefits including:

• Back up multiple versions of your SAP HANA data in seconds via storage-based snapshots. Restore the data equally fast to enable continuous business processes.
• Replicate critical business data and achieve fast, efficient disaster recovery via NetApp Snap Creator Framework plug-ins.
• Achieve disaster tolerance and continuous availability with zero data loss. Synchronous data replication through integration with NetApp MetroCluster software keeps SAP HANA running in the event of unplanned outages.

Microsoft SQL Server:

Accelerate business success with best-in-class NetApp solutions for Microsoft SQL Server in the data center or cloud.

The NetApp solution for Microsoft SQL Server delivers high performance, manageability, scalability, and data protection—on premises and in the cloud. Deliver the applications you need across cloud resources using NetApp’s vision for a Data Fabric.

Run your SQL Server environment on NetApp All Flash FAS arrays to:

• Increase performance.
• Reduce storage and data management costs.
• Accelerate application test/dev and deployment.

Our solution for SQL Server conforms to Microsoft best practices and provides:

• Faster speed of business. Decrease database latency by up to 95%. Increase DB throughput by up to 4x.
• Better cost management. Consolidate servers and databases by up to 50%. Decrease database license fees by up to 50%.
• Efficiency and ROI. Achieve a seamless path to hybrid cloud. Reduce database copy times from hours to minutes. Reduce time to spin up/down DB test/dev copies by 80%. Increase CPU utilization by up to 4x.

The Challenge

Increase data availability while reducing management costs
The scope, scale, and complexity of today’s data-driven world create new demands for agility in the data center. Microsoft® SQL Server is a powerful and cost-effective database solution that has been deployed to meet a wide variety of enterprise needs, including typical OLTP deployments and complex data warehouse environments. Supporting enterprise-wide deployments of these complex scenarios—with the addition of unprecedented data growth and increased pressure to continue to innovate—can significantly increase the complexity of your IT environment, resulting in higher overhead and administrative costs. Widely distributed data assets often lack integration and can result in poor system availability. The key to solving these issues is to upgrade your SQL Server infrastructure to include a flexible enterprise-class storage solution that serves your data efficiently and reliably while reducing management costs.

The Solution

Deploy SQL Server on NetApp storage
Integrated with Microsoft technologies, the NetApp Unified Storage Architecture delivers the performance, manageability, scalability, and data protection your organization needs to meet even the most stringent business requirements. You get more efficient, reliable data storage and cut costs at the same time. The combination of our storage solutions with your SQL Server environment can help you:

• Eliminate planned and unplanned downtime for continuous business availability.
• Simplify data management across on-premises and cloud deployments.
• Reduce storage and data management costs.
• Enable better data protection.
• Accelerate the deployment, testing, and QA application lifecycle.
• Maximize application performance with advanced flash technologies and SQL Server 2014 in memory storage options.

Improve business results

You can improve your bottom line and receive rapid return on your investment with NetApp storage solutions that are tailored for Microsoft SQL Server. You can save money through thin provisioning to eliminate pools of unused storage and increase storage utilization, reduce and simplify your data management, and increase DBA productivity through scripting and automation capabilities. You’re able to grow as business needs dictate, without disrupting the system or your end users. With nondisruptive operations you’re better able to accommodate testing and perform short-term projects. And when unforeseen events disrupt your system, you can recover rapidly. We’ve built our reputation on the results we’ve provided to thousands of companies and organizations running SQL Server.

With our agile storage infrastructure, you can easily consolidate data from multiple SQL Server systems onto a unified storage architecture supporting FC, FCoE, iSCSI SAN, and SMB 3.0 (CIFS) NAS, based upon your preferences. By eliminating data silos in this manner, you can benefit from storage efficiency features such as NetApp Snapshot and FlexClone technologies. As the need arises, you can extend your storage solution to add new functionality for disk-based backup vaulting, disaster recovery, and other capabilities. With the NetApp clustered Data ONTAP storage operating system, you can nondisruptively meet the needs of SQL Server data growth and changing SQL Server application workloads. One aspect of this is the ability to support multi-tenancy environments, where a storage cluster can be securely partitioned to isolate individual tenants— for instance, in a service provider environment—or individual applications, workgroups, business units, and so on. In addition, clustered Data ONTAP also provides storage QoS workload management that allows you to reactively or proactively control the resources that can be consumed by each SQL Server workload. The combination of multitenancy and QoS makes sure that SQL Server performance is not affected by other application workloads, resulting in improved performance consistency and increased customer satisfaction.

NetApp solution for Microsoft SQL Server.

Partner for success

NetApp Professional Services for Microsoft Applications offer a wide range of services, including SQL Server deployment on the NetApp storage platform, disaster recovery, and high availability, as well as custom services tailored to customers’ needs. To meet your interoperability and performance needs, we collaborate closely with Microsoft on key product integration efforts and product validation. In fact, NetApp was recently awarded Microsoft Partner of the Year for server solutions. NetApp Global Support and our extensive partner network can provide expert help to assist you in planning and implementing an efficient and reliable storage and data management solution for your SQL Server environment.

Challenge	NetApp Solution
Reduce costs	Reduce your total cost of ownership by consolidating your SQL Server databases onto NetApp storage systems. Our support for FC, FCoE, iSCSI SAN, and SMB (CIFS) means you can leverage your existing infrastructure to cut storage outlay. Our unified architecture helps you increase storage and server utilization while simplifying data management. Particularly, NetApp’s built-in support for SMB 3.0 greatly simplifies provisioning of database clones, e.g., for use in test/dev.
Optimize database performance	NetApp has end-to-end flash options, such as hybrid flash/HDD systems with Flash Cache and Flash Pool, and all-flash arrays such as the EF550 for low-latency, submillisecond performance requirements. Our flash-based solutions help you speed overall performance, boost responsiveness of performance-critical scenarios, reduce power costs and overprovisioning, and improve utilization of your data center space.
Speed backup and increase data protection	With NetApp integrated data protection solutions, you get quick, space-efficient backups and a comprehensive set of Windows PowerShell® cmdlets for easy scripting of backup/restore workflows. With federated backup, you can add multiple SQL Server instances and databases to the same federated group and take a Snapshot copy to back up all databases in that group at the same time. You have the ability to restore to a marker so you can tie recovery to a business event, which is particularly useful for applications that span multiple databases across multiple SQL Server instances. You also can enable NetApp thin replication technology to protect your critical SQL Server database data, including SQL Server Availability Groups, against disasters.
Optimize disaster recovery and business continuity	To help you meet or exceed your stringent service-level agreements, NetApp storage solutions enable rapid recovery of SQL Server databases—in minutes. With NetApp clustered Data ONTAP software you can maintain SQL Server uptime during storage infrastructure (hardware and software) maintenance and upgrades through a highly available storage back end. Additionally, with built-in support for AlwaysOn Availability Groups (AGs) in SQL Server 2012 and 2014 combined with the latest release of SnapManager for Microsoft SQL Server, you can accelerate AG setup, rapidly back up and restore all databases in AGs, create space-efficient clones of databases in AGs using NetApp FlexClone technology, and quickly resynchronize databases within the AG using the SMSQL Reseed wizard. In addition, AGs can be mirrored to remote locations using NetApp SnapMirror technology.
Provide multi-tenancy and QoS	Customers can utilize functionality that Data ONTAP offers to provide data compartmentalization for all tenants, with each granted access only to its designated storage container. Rich support based on Windows PowerShell for both Data ONTAP and NetApp integrated backup empowers administrators to develop appropriate workflows that support the needs of your multi-tenant environment. In addition, clustered Data ONTAP provides storage QoS workload management using policies that specify a throughput limit, defined in terms of IOPS or MB/sec. This makes sure that SQL Server performance can be optimized consistently without being affected by other application workloads or tenants.
Achieve intelligent management	NetApp integrated backup helps you streamline administrative tasks such as backup, restore, cloning, and disaster recovery so that administrators can focus on more strategic tasks and business initiatives. With SnapManager federated backups you can simplify data protection of SQL Server applications where data is distributed across multiple SQL Server instances and databases. In addition, the combination of Data ONTAP and Windows PowerShell scripting enables DBAs to automate management of LUNs and volumes.
Improve manual, slow, and space-inefficient test and development processes	Accelerate the release and improve the quality of new applications based on SQL Server with NetApp FlexClone technology. With FlexClone, you can create space-efficient copies of SQL Server data for development, testing, reporting, and disaster recovery testing in seconds. You can also perform clone lifecycle management as well as on-demand, periodic, and customized staging and user-acceptance testing services. You can do this quickly through a policy-based clone automation framework and without causing errors to other DBAs and end users.
Speed deployment of business-critical applications with converged infrastructure	FlexPod validated solutions combine storage, networking, and server components into a single, flexible architecture for business workloads such as SQL Server. FlexPod solutions speed the deployment of infrastructure and business-critical applications while reducing costs, complexity, and risk. With a validated design and centralized management, you can quickly and easily deploy and host multiple instances of SQL Server, all with cooperative support from Microsoft, Cisco, and NetApp.
Respond quickly to data growth	With seamless scaling you can quickly and easily scale NetApp solutions to meet your changing business needs. With thin provisioning provided by NetApp FlexVol technology, you can cost-effectively expand and reallocate storage while increasing efficiency through deduplication of active data—all without interfering with your business operations. Clustered Data ONTAP allows you to nondisruptively move your data within your storage cluster to meet the needs of SQL Server data growth and increased and changing SQL Server application workloads.

Microsoft SharePoint Server:

NetApp storage solutions for Microsoft SharePoint Server help reduce costs, improve scalability, and provide integrated data protection.

Use NetApp storage solutions for Microsoft SharePoint Server to help people in your enterprise perform more effectively, sharing information and collaborating whenever they need to.

NetApp offers an optimized portfolio for SharePoint Server that delivers the performance and efficiency of our E-Series platform, plus the intelligent data management of our FAS storage systems. You can:

• Increase your data availability with rapid backups and perform granular recovery in minutes. Achieve nondisruptive operations for storage during routine maintenance and upgrades.
• Improve scalability and resource utilization by storing and managing large data files in SMB (CIFS) shares outside the Microsoft SQL Server database used by SharePoint.

Our SharePoint Server solutions are integrated with Microsoft technologies and support physical and virtual environments, and they can be hosted on our FlexPod validated converged infrastructure—on premise, or in the cloud.

SnapManager for SharePoint provides intelligent management of your growing SharePoint environment. Our deep integration with AvePoint DocAve software enables you to deploy an integrated platform that supports end-to-end SharePoint storage, management, monitoring, and governance.

The Challenge

Support rapidly growing SharePoint environments while managing IT resources efficiently
The scope, scale, and complexity of today’s data-driven world create new demands for agility in the data center. To increase collaboration and productivity across the enterprise, many of today’s businesses deploy content management and collaboration systems. Microsoft SharePoint Server is a leading enterprise content management and collaboration platform deployed across many organizations. For SharePoint administrators and IT management, this development poses a number of challenges:

• Cost-effectively meeting SLAs based on increasing business requirements
• Managing storage and performance for rapidly growing SharePoint Server farms
• Protecting SharePoint data efficiently
• Meeting archive, compliance, and governance requirements

The Solution: An Agile Storage Infrastructure

The answer to these challenges is the comprehensive NetApp intelligent data management solution SnapManager for SharePoint (SMSP), which delivers an agile storage infrastructure that stores, manages, protects, and retains data for many workloads within the SharePoint platform, including collaboration portals, document repositories, workflows, and Internet sites based on Microsoft SharePoint Server.

Our storage solutions allow your IT staff to monitor the health of and manage SharePoint Server 2010 and 2013 farms across the enterprise from a centralized location. With NetApp, you can easily provision additional storage as needed without affecting your SharePoint users. Our Integrated Data Protection solutions also help you automate data protection, including data backup leveraging NetApp Snapshot technology and replication for disaster recovery purposes using NetApp SnapMirror technology.

Tight integration with Microsoft technologies means increased scalability of your SharePoint environment by storing and managing BLOB data on NetApp SMB (CIFS) shares outside the Microsoft SQL Server database using SMSP Storage Manager’s Remote BLOB Storage Provider.

Reduce costs and increase storage efficiency

By consolidating your SharePoint data onto a NetApp storage infrastructure, you can reduce costs through improved storage utilization and intelligent data management. With NetApp solutions for SharePoint Server, you can:

• Save money through space-efficient storage and deduplication of redundant SharePoint data.
• Increase IT productivity by automating various data management functions.
• Reduce costs with Storage Manager and Archive Manager, which can automatically place large data files on less expensive SATA storage for comprehensive hierarchical storage management.

For test and development scenarios, NetApp FlexClone simplifies the efficient creation of full-fidelity copies of SharePoint databases to new farms. This allows you to cost-effectively support development environments without impacting the production environment. Also use NetApp SnapMirror to replicate SharePoint content to remote data centers for disaster recovery purposes.

To further reduce costs and increase efficiency, our SharePoint storage solutions support virtualized IT environments, including Microsoft Windows Server with Hyper-V and VMware vSphere as well as private cloud implementations, to shrink your overall physical infrastructure footprint and provide integrated management, automation, and self-provisioning capability.

Comprehensively manage SharePoint data

SnapManager for SharePoint can be used to automate application-consistent backups of the entire SharePoint farm using NetApp Snapshot technology, which can be used to perform granular restore of content. The automated discovery feature of NetApp SnapManager for Microsoft SharePoint helps you easily discover SharePoint farm data, saving time doing manual setup tasks. And with the Health Analyzer, you can easily scan individual SharePoint servers or entire farms to check the overall configuration, including software prerequisite checks, network, access management, and Windows Server settings.

Our agile storage infrastructure combined with the centralized policy-based data management delivered by the NetApp OnCommand suite of data management applications enables you to quickly provision additional storage resources without affecting SharePoint users. Further, with built-in role-based access controls, you can easily manage the administration of multiple users with multiple roles through the SnapManager management console.

You can easily connect existing file shares with SharePoint through SMSP Connector, which enables users to manage connected data with SharePoint without having to import the data into SharePoint. With SMSP Archive Manager, you can complete the data management cycle by automatically retiring data from SharePoint after it reaches specified archive parameters.

Scale seamlessly

Storage Manager easily moves large unstructured data files, or BLOBs, outside the SQL Server database by using Remote BLOB Storage. By moving large unstructured data to less expensive SATA disk–based SMB shares, you can store and manage large data files more efficiently while improving the scalability and reducing the expense of your SharePoint environment.

With the clustered Data ONTAP operating system, you have the flexibility to scale up or scale out your storage resources based upon your specific needs. You have the freedom to scale on demand with our shared virtual infrastructure so you can respond quickly to growth.

Safeguard SharePoint with Integrated Data Protection

With our Snapshot technology, you can increase data protection by taking backups more frequently without affecting system performance and using minimal incremental storage space.

With NetApp, you can back up the complete SharePoint farm, including Fast Search Server for SharePoint, web front-end servers, web applications, SharePoint search, and InfoPath forms. With SnapManager for SharePoint or NetApp SnapProtect software, FAST Content SSA and FAST certificates can be automatically backed up and restored as well as Nintex workflows. You can also quickly restore SharePoint data as granularly as needed, including an entire SharePoint farm, site collection, site, subsite, document, or specific document version, including associated metadata.

SnapManager for Microsoft SharePoint.

Clustered Data ONTAP provides nondisruptive operations during your storage infrastructure maintenance and upgrades with seamless cluster failover capabilities within the storage subsystem. This enables you to quickly reestablish full system functionality and help keep your business running at peak performance.

With support for multi-tenancy, customers can utilize functionality that Data ONTAP offers to provide data compartmentalization for all tenants, with each granted access only to its designated storage container. In addition, clustered Data ONTAP provides storage quality of service (QoS) workload management using policies that specify a throughput limit, defined in terms of IOPS or MB/ sec. This optimizes SharePoint Server performance consistently without being affected by other application workloads or tenants.

Meet archive, compliance, and governance requirements

Our archive and compliance solutions help you further reduce storage expenses through low-cost, disk-based longterm storage. You can archive data to SnapLock devices for compliance while lowering SharePoint storage expense. We also offer encryption solutions that help reduce the risk of inadvertent or malicious alteration of your SharePoint Server data in both the content database and remote BLOB storage. With the addition of SnapVault software, you can store weeks, months, or even years of backups on secondary storage while substantially reducing disk capacity requirements.

Extend your solution with AvePoint DocAve integration

Combining the power of the AvePoint DocAve software platform and NetApp storage and data manage-ment, the new integrated platform of NetApp SnapManager for SharePoint and AvePoint DocAve now supports endto-end SharePoint storage, management, monitoring, and deployment of governance policies. In addition to the features provided by SnapManager, you can monitor health usage, enable data compliance and security, manage application lifecycle development, restructure content, and perform migration projects, all through one unified interface.

Partner for success

NetApp Professional Services for Microsoft Applications offers a wide range of services, including SharePoint Server implementation on the NetApp storage platform, disaster recovery, and high availability, as well as custom services to help customers successfully deploy SharePoint Server. To meet your interoperability and performance needs, we collaborate closely with Microsoft on key product integration efforts, including performance testing, product validation, and joint development. In fact, NetApp was recently awarded Microsoft Partner of the Year for server solutions. NetApp Global Support and our extensive partner network can provide expert help to assist you in planning and implementing an efficient and reliable storage and data manage ment solution for your SharePoint Server environment.

Challenge	NetApp Solution
Achieving complete SharePoint infrastructure management and governance	Optimize SharePoint management with a single unified platform that integrates AvePoint DocAve with NetApp storage and data management to achieve end-to-end management of global SharePoint deployments with simplified deployment, monitoring, and enforcement of SharePoint governance policies. You can simplify content migration and obtain comprehensive real-time intelligence about your SharePoint deployment, including operations, performance, and content usage. In addition, you can manage development, test, and production farms and govern solution deployment with DocAve application lifecycle management tools.
Reducing costs	You can reduce storage costs, streamline management, and use your storage assets more efficiently when you consolidate your SharePoint Server environment on NetApp. Our FlexVol thin-provisioning technology allows you to significantly increase storage efficiency. To further reduce costs, our data deduplication technology eliminates redundant SharePoint data. The NetApp Unified Storage Architecture also enables you to implement virtual storage tiering from which you can optimize storage resources for your SharePoint environment. NetApp FlexClone provides the ability to quickly and efficiently create full-fidelity copies of SharePoint databases and web applications for placement on new farms for test/development scenarios.
Achieving seamless scalability	Our storage solutions allow you to easily store and manage documents stored outside the SQL Server database used by SharePoint. With Storage Manager, you can select multiple criteria upon which you can automatically move large data files onto lower cost SMB (CIFS) shares in real time or on a schedule for comprehensive hierarchical storage management. Along with the ability to readily provision additional storage at any time without impact, these capabilities help you to improve the storage efficiency and scalability of your SharePoint environment.
Virtualizing your SharePoint Server environment	Our SharePoint storage solutions support virtualized IT environments, including Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware, along with private cloud implementations to shrink your overall physical infrastructure footprint and provide automation and self-provisioning capability. With virtualized SharePoint environments, you can expand your options for resource provisioning, data protection, availability, and disaster recovery.
Improving manageability	You can benefit from a highly intuitive user interface along with our Windows PowerShell cmdlets and application extensibility, which deliver the flexibility and automation needed to intelligently manage your SharePoint data. You can easily connect existing file shares with SharePoint using Connector, which enables users to manage externally connected data using SharePoint. With the automated discovery feature of NetApp SnapManager for Microsoft SharePoint, you can easily discover SharePoint farm data, saving time doing manual setup tasks.
Improving backup and recovery	With SnapManager for Microsoft SharePoint and SnapProtect software, your backup and recovery processes are more efficient, reliable, and secure with integrated data protection. You can rapidly create or automate backups with little or no impact on system performance and quickly and easily recover SharePoint data, including an entire SharePoint farm, site collection, site, subsite, single document, or specific document version as needed, including associated metadata.
Providing multi-tenancy and QoS	Customers can utilize functionality that Data ONTAP offers to provide data compartmentalization for all tenants, with each granted access only to its designated storage container. Rich support based on Windows PowerShell for both Data ONTAP and NetApp integrated backup empowers administrators to develop appropriate workflows that support the needs of your multi-tenant environment. In addition, clustered Data ONTAP provides storage QoS workload management using policies that specify a throughput limit, defined in terms of IOPS or MB/sec. This makes sure that SharePoint performance can be optimized consistently without being affected by other application workloads or tenants.
Implementing cost-effective disaster recovery	With our SnapMirror technologies, you can cost-effectively protect data from local and regional disasters. Our RAID-DP technology protects you from data loss even when you have double-disk failure.
Optimizing performance	NetApp has end-to-end flash options, such as hybrid flash/HDD systems with Flash Cache and Flash Pool, server-based caching with Flash Accel™, and all-flash arrays such as the EF540 for low-latency performance requirements. The solutions optimize enterprise storage for SharePoint Server. Our flash-based solutions help you speed overall performance, boost responsiveness of performance-critical scenarios, reduce power costs and overprovisioning, and improve utilization of your data center space.
Meeting compliance regulations	Our archive and compliance solutions, including Archive Manager, help you further reduce storage costs with the use of low-cost, disk-based long-term storage. You can archive data to SnapLock devices for compliance. We also offer encryption solutions that help reduce the risk of inadvertent or malicious alteration of your SharePoint Server data. With the addition of SnapVault, you can store weeks, months, or even years of backups on lower-cost secondary storage while substantially reducing disk capacity requirements.

Microsoft Exchange Server:

NetApp solutions for Microsoft Exchange Server can boost availability, simplify application management, and lower TCO.

NetApp solutions for Microsoft Exchange Server are engineered to take advantage of the latest features in Exchange Server, for increased availability, reduced storage costs, and a simpler IT environment. Improve storage utilization by up to 70% by migrating and consolidating your Exchange Server data onto NetApp storage.

NetApp's optimized portfolio for Exchange Server delivers the performance and efficiency of our E-Series platform, plus the intelligent data management of our FAS storage systems. NetApp clustered Data ONTAP software enables scalability, flexibility, and nondisruptive operations. 

Our integrated NetApp and Microsoft technologies can help you:

• Reduce or eliminate planned and unplanned downtime.
• Achieve secure multi-tenancy and QoS.
• Deploy applications in a private cloud with automation and self-provisioning by leveraging the NetApp FlexPod validated, converged infrastructure.
• Maximize application performance with flash-based storage options.

NetApp storage solutions for Exchange Server conform to Microsoft best practices, so you can deploy them with confidence.

The Challenge

Simplify Microsoft Exchange Server data management
The scope, scale, and complexity of today’s data-driven world create new demands for agility in the modern data center. More than ever, many companies view enterprise messaging as a businesscritical application. The enterprise messaging system that leads the market is Microsoft Exchange Server. With this powerful platform, you can increase productivity by enabling people across your organization to communicate and collaborate quickly and easily. Today’s global business environment requires continuous e-mail access for users, devices, and applications.

To get the most value from your enterprise messaging system, you need an agile storage infrastructure that maximizes data availability through nondisruptive operations. You also need to be able to recover rapidly in the event of an outage or a disaster, to delegate granular e-mail recovery to help-desk personnel, and to address the growing e-mail storage requirements that pressure shrinking IT budgets. These issues are particularly common in businesses that use direct-attached storage (DAS) for their enterprise messaging infrastructure, which produces underused storage assets and high storage administrative costs.

You might also be contending with the challenge of managing multiple messaging platforms of varying vintages across the enterprise, perhaps as the result of a merger or an acquisition. This presents an opportunity to consolidate and standardize your enterprise messaging environment, but you might want help in developing the right infrastructure strategy. In addition, if you are migrating to Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 or 2013, you’ll want to minimize the impact on users during the transition.

Complying with government and industry regulations is another important challenge that many companies face today. You need a secure yet economical archival solution to enforce retention requirements so that your data remains complete, accurate, and accessible when you need it.

To address all of these challenges, you need an approach that focuses on storing and managing your Exchange data more efficiently and economically while increasing the availability of your enterprise messaging environment to users across your company. You also need a flexible enterprise messaging infrastructure that can readily scale to keep pace with the evolving needs of your business.

The Solution

Deploy Exchange Server on NetApp storage
Integrated with Microsoft technologies, the NetApp Unified Storage Architecture delivers the performance, manageability, scalability, and data protection your organization needs to meet even the most stringent business requirements. You get more efficient, reliable data storage and cut costs at the same time. The combination of our storage solutions with your Exchange Server environment can help you:

• Increase application availability by reducing planned and unplanned downtime.
• Simplify data management.
• Reduce storage and data management costs.
• Enable better data protection.
• Maximize application performance with flash-based storage options.

Our agile storage infrastructure can store, manage, protect, and retain data for enterprise messaging systems based on Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 and 2013. NetApp and Microsoft engineers work closely together so that our technologies integrate well and deliver outstanding performance and capabilities. As a result, NetApp can help optimize your Exchange Server deployment. Our industry-leading solutions are engineered to take advantage of the latest features in Exchange Server and to help you increase availability, reduce storage costs, and simplify your IT environment.

Increase data availability and improve productivity

You can increase data availability, improve productivity, and realize significant cost savings by migrating and consolidating your Exchange Server data onto NetApp storage systems. With clustered Data ONTAP, you can nondisruptively meet the needs of Exchange Server mailbox growth by performing routine maintenance and upgrades without affecting Exchange users.

With the NetApp clustered Data ONTAP storage operating system, you have the ability to support multi-tenancy environments, where a storage cluster can be securely partitioned to isolate individual tenants—for instance, in a service provider environment—or individual applications, workgroups, business units, and so on. In addition, clustered Data ONTAP also provides storage QoS workload management that allows you to reactively or proactively control the resources that can be consumed by each Exchange Server workload. The combination of multi-tenancy and QoS makes sure that Exchange Server performance is not affected by other application workloads, resulting in improved performance consistency and increased customer satisfaction.

Our solutions support both physical and virtualized infrastructure environments based on hypervisor technologies, including VMware and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and 2012 Hyper-V. Going beyond virtualization, NetApp helps customers deploy applications in a private cloud with automation and self-provisioning capabilities, further optimizing resource utilization and efficiency. With the NetApp unified architecture, you can simplify the infrastructure of your Exchange Server environment and use fewer disparate server and storage systems, dramatically lowering your costs.

You can also increase your ability to protect your data with NetApp Snapshot technology, which enables you to make more frequent backups— with minimal impact on system performance—while increasing the efficiency of your storage resources. SnapManager for Microsoft Exchange features “gapless backup,” which enables up-to-the-minute restore capability for database availability group (DAG) backups created from any node in the DAG up to a maximum of nine nodes. This overcomes the challenge of Exchange Server truncating logs across all DAG nodes, because the Exchange administrator can select which nodes retain the up-to-the-minute capability. In addition, NetApp SnapManager software enables the log chain to be preserved to extend granular up-tothe-minute recoverability to all nodes in the DAG across all backups.

Streamlining your storage infrastructure with NetApp also helps you to simplify data management and provides a solid foundation for a smooth transition to Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 and 2013.

NetApp solution for Microsoft Exchange Server

Speed backup and recovery

With NetApp solutions, you get quick, space-efficient backups that significantly reduce the time needed to bring data back online. You can quickly and easily recover and restore data, including individual mailboxes, messages, or attachments, and the granular recovery can be delegated to help-desk personnel using policy-based security. Additionally, you can back up an Exchange Server DAG as a whole. Because you can perform nondisruptive, full backups in minutes, our solutions enable you to back up more frequently and to protect more of your data. In addition, our backup and recovery solutions let your IT staff automate data backups. As a result, you can achieve improved data protection and increased availability for your enterprise messaging system.

Reduce DAG reseeding time

You can reduce the time needed for reseeding of passive database copies in a DAG environment. Reseeding is a time-consuming and expensive process due to the amount of network bandwidth required. SnapManager for Exchange addresses this issue in its entirety so you can automate the reseeding of failed DAG nodes 10 times more quickly than the out-of-box Exchange Server solution.

Meet archive and compliance requirements

Our archive and compliance solutions help you reduce storage costs by providing affordable, disk-based longterm storage. Exchange Server backup retention rule enforcement is supported across multiple management groups. In addition, you can configure up-tothe-minute backup retention to run separately from backup jobs. With the addition of NetApp SnapVault software, you can store weeks, months, or even years of backups on less expensive secondary storage while reducing disk capacity requirements dramatically. SnapProtect software, through postscript capabilities, allows administrators to easily integrate with tape-based backup archival systems.

Reduce costs and increase efficiency

With our flexible storage infrastructure for Exchange, you can reduce costs and streamline management of your enterprise messaging environment. Additional benefits include:

• Reduced capital expenses through improved storage utilization utilizing technology such as NetApp FlexVol thin provisioning, which enables you to significantly increase storage efficiency, and our data deduplication technology, which eliminates redundant Exchange Server data.
• Increased productivity and reduced labor costs related to operation and management.
• Reduced storage system footprint and data center costs, including power and cooling.
• Enhanced resiliency of your Exchange Server environment to reduce downtime costs.
• Increased scalability to grow when you need to, without disrupting your end users.
• Support for virtualized and cloud environments, which means greater utilization and efficiency.

Partner for success

NetApp Professional Services for Microsoft applications offer a wide range of services, including Exchange Server deployment on the NetApp storage platform, including disaster recovery and high availability, as well as custom services tailored to customers’ needs. To meet your interoperability and performance needs, we collaborate closely with Microsoft on key product integration efforts and product validation. In fact, NetApp was recently awarded Microsoft Partner of the Year for server solutions.

Challenge	NetApp Solution
Reduce costs	Reduce your total cost of ownership by consolidating your Exchange Server deployment onto NetApp storage systems. Our support for FC, FCoE, and iSCSI SAN means you can leverage your existing infrastructure to cut storage outlay. Our unified architecture helps you increase storage and server utilization while simplifying data management. NetApp can also help slash operational costs by substantially reducing your power, cooling, and floor space needs. From traditional physical environments to virtual infrastructure solutions that leverage technology such as Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware, we can help you operate more efficiently and cut costs.
Reduce storage capacity requirements and increase efficiency	NetApp’s space-efficient Snapshot technology enables you to use far less storage to maintain multiple replicated database copies for data protection for any version of Exchange Server. You can achieve further efficiency with NetApp deduplication. Microsoft no longer includes Single Instance Storage (SIS) in Exchange Server 2010 or 2013, making NetApp deduplication essential to eliminate duplicate data across all storage tiers. Deduplication also helps eliminate duplicate data in archived storage. In all cases, NetApp deduplication can help you free up storage space and increase efficiency.
Improve availability	With NetApp FAS storage systems, you can minimize disruptions caused by expanding your online storage. Your backups are rapid, and you can recover any size database in minutes. With clustered Data ONTAP you can achieve nondisruptive operations with seamless failover in the storage cluster during routine maintenance and upgrades.
Optimize performance	NetApp has end-to-end flash options, such as hybrid flash/HDD systems with Flash Cache™, server-based caching with Flash Accel™, and all-flash arrays such as the EF540 for low-latency performance requirements. The solutions optimize enterprise storage for Exchange Server. Our flash-based solutions help you speed overall performance, boost responsiveness of performancecritical scenarios, reduce power costs and overprovisioning, and improve utilization of your data center space.
Support e-mail volume growth and retention	As your e-mail volume grows, you can add storage capacity without disrupting Exchange or your users. With clustered Data ONTAP, you can leverage the block-level incremental replication of NetApp SnapVault to achieve a reliable, low-overhead disk-to-disk (D2D) backup solution. To further reduce costs, you can seamlessly archive older data by leveraging NetApp E-Series high-performance, modular storage systems.
Achieve intelligent management	E-mail administration is more efficient when you use NetApp SnapManager for Exchange to fully automate data backup and recovery processes for your enterprise messaging system. You can also benefit from our Windows PowerShell cmdlets and application extensibility, which deliver the flexibility and automation needed to intelligently manage your Exchange data.
Speed search and retrieval	You can quickly find and retrieve individual mailboxes, messages, and attachments directly from online and offline Snapshot copies with NetApp Single Mailbox Recovery for Microsoft Exchange software. You can also use this powerful software for e-discovery to rapidly search across multiple mailboxes by using multiple search criteria. In addition to saving time, Single Mailbox Recovery helps you to reduce costs by eliminating the need to set up and maintain a separate recovery server and storage system to restore individual mailboxes.
Meet compliance requirements	You can implement e-mail retention policies and regulations by archiving e-mail using NetApp SnapLock software to create compliant write once, read many (WORM) volumes.