Its storage business is growing quickly
TONY WALTHAM
NetApp is ramping up its presence in Thailand, having tripled its staff here from four to 12 over the past two months, as the company sees the Asean region as a major opportunity. The storage and data management company increased business here by 80 per cent last year, and Asean managing director Suresh Nair said that it was on target to double business in Thailand this year.
NetApp had also expanded its partner operations and was now in the process of recruiting more partners here, he said. These currently included Yip In Tsoi and MTEC Computer, and would be expanded to seven or eight partners, he said. In particular, NetApp would continue to grow its professional services division, which Nair said had comprised just three people when he joined NetApp in January 2007, but which had now become a 30-strong team. Nair said that NetApp was now in Gartner's magic quadrant for mid-range enterprise disk arrays along with EMC, and the analyst had also said in a May market share report that NetApp had over 48 per cent of the NAS/unified storage market share.
He characterised NetApp's unified architecture for SAN and NAS as being the broadest unified storage platform providing a single, scalable architecture with multi-vendor support that was "transparent". NetApp was a leader in data centre transformation, which was being driven by server virtualisation, data protection and retention needs, IP connectivity and energy concerns, Nair explained. The massive shift to server virtualisation meant that networked storage was needed, while this was creating new challenges for data back-up and protection.
Back-ups should be disk-based, rather than to tape, he said, and NetApp believes that by combining the use of several technologies for efficient storage that it has developed, it is possible to get copies of data stored on disk at close to the same cost as tape. The technologies include data deduplication, thin provisioning, replication software and flexible volume management, Nair said at a press briefing last week.
In making recommendations for transforming the data centre, Nair said that shared networked storage was a requirement for virtual machine mobility, while multiple applications per server called for enhanced data protection.
He suggested avoiding vendor lock-in with multi-protocol support and said that by using deduplication, a reduction of between 50 and 90 per cent of VMware's space requirements could be achieved.
Urging taking control of data growth, he advocated minimising duplicates of data, using thin provisioning for higher storage utilisation, the use of the same physical storage for disaster recovery as well as for test and development, and to only back up changed data.
Making the right storage choices could help promote "green IT" and drive out 50 per cent of the cost of power and cooling as well as delaying the need to build the next data centre with a 50 per cent savings in space, he said.
Nair also noted that NetApp would open an Innovation Centre in Singapore next month containing equipment worth $1 million and which would be launched in collaboration with the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore.
This would provide a test bed for simulation, benchmarking and performance testing so that independent software vendors including VMWare, Oracle, SAP and Microsoft could develop and test applications.
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