In its effort to address these customer needs in mixed, multi-vendor storage environments, NetApp has introduced new targeted offerings based on its ReplicatorX (formerly TDPS) enterprise-class replication software for disaster recovery (DR), data migration, and cloning for test and development. The non-disruptive offerings translate to reduced acquisition and deployment costs and freedom from vendor lock-in for data centre customers.

NetApp also enhanced both SnapDrive, for server storage management, and Virtual File Manager Enterprise Edition (VFM-EE), for file data management. NetApp also recently strengthened its customers' application data management capabilities by adding support for SAP and SharePoint 2007 environments to its existing portfolio of solutions for Oracle, Microsoft SQL, and Microsoft Exchange. All are included in the NetApp Manageability Software Family that NetApp customers leverage for increased productivity and flexibility by allowing the application administrators to manage their data and react quickly to changing business conditions.

"Today's announcement speaks to continued and expanded NetApp expertise in the data center and in addressing both NetApp and heterogeneous data and storage management", stated Patrick Rogers, vice president, Solutions Marketing at NetApp. "In mixed-vendor storage environments we're providing customers with the flexibility to support multiple vendors and protocols with a budget-friendly tiered storage approach. In a NetApp storage environment, we're offering customers powerful tools that are application-centric for easy management and that use thin provisioning for space optimization. Both solutions are empowering our customers to better protect and access their data assets while keeping costs down."

New targeted ReplicatorX offerings are based on solution features that address the specific business needs of enterprise customers with mixed storage environments. These four new offerings include enterprise and standard editions for heterogeneous DR, data migration, and cloning of production data for test and development as well as a business continuity service provider offering.

Conventional storage array–based replication alternatives are known for locking customers into expensive, single-vendor storage systems at recovery sites. ReplicatorX enables you to tier a DR storage infrastructure to leverage cost-effective storage solutions at recovery sites - no matter the distance. Compared to typical host-based heterogeneous replication alternatives, ReplicatorX has almost no impact on application performance. Customers can deploy these targeted offerings with an easy-to-use centralized management interface for enterprise-wide protection. Additionally, support for global data consistency across multiple servers and/or storage infrastructures results in rapid application recovery from a disaster, eliminating the time-consuming task of data reconciliation at the recovery site.

QUINN-direct Insurance is a wholly owned insurance company within the Quinn group of companies based in Ireland. The company provides a full suite of general insurance products. including motor and home insurance as well as commercial liability, property damage, and commercial vehicle and fleet covers. QUINN-direct deployed NetApp ReplicatorX in its Wintel server environment to improve performance, have better control over application recovery times, and provide data integrity.

"QUINN-direct has aggressive business continuance objectives designed to best serve our customers, which sets us apart from our competition", stated Michael Graham, IT Infrastructure manager at QUINN-direct. "The ability to quickly failover servers when required is vital to our business operations. A near-real-time recovery plan for all IT services is critical for our business strategy and continued growth and for addressing regulatory compliance. The easy-to-manage, heterogeneous ReplicatorX solution provides QUINN-direct with the sense of security that, even in the face of a natural event or disaster, our customers’ data can be easily recovered and protected."

NetApp, positioned in the Visionary quadrant of Gartner's 2007 Storage Resource Management and SAN Management Software Magic Quadrant, is helping customers increase business responsiveness, more easily manage their application data availability, and lower their cost of management with the company's various suites of manageability products. Today's enhancements to SnapDrive for Windows and UNIX provide increased productivity and flexibility by automating provisioning of storage to a server.

The new version of SnapDrive for Windows provides the first true thin provisioning capability in the market that enables customers to optimize the primary storage utilization and, more importantly, their secondary storage utilization, as well as SnapDrive's Snapshot management capabilities. Integration with Windows and UNIX platforms has been enhanced with the addition of rapid recovery capabilities, thus increasing the availability of applications. Additionally, the latest version of VFM provides enhanced UNIX support with the addition of optimized file data migration and management for RHEL 4.0 and Solaris 10.0. NetApp also recently extended its data management value to more customer-critical business data with new offerings for SAP and SharePoint 2007.

Greenhill & Company, an independent global investment banking firm focused on mergers and acquisitions, financial restructuring, and merchant banking deployed VFM and NetApp SnapMirror.

"We were in need of a reliable business continuity solution that helped us to simply manage our data, which included Word files, PowerPoint presentations, and many Excel files", stated John Shaffer, director of Global Systems and Technology at Greenhill. "We selected NetApp based on its architectural simplicity. NetApp SnapMirror with VFM software support byte-level replications between our New York headquarters and offices in London and Frankfurt, Germany, as well as an off-site DR facility. NetApp is helping us to dramatically reduce complexity and simplify how we're managing data."

Complete design and implementation services are available for deploying both ReplicatorX data cloning and disaster recovery solutions in heterogeneous storage environments as well as SnapDrive storage resource management and SAN management solutions. NetApp ReplicatorX Implementation Services include both a fixed-price ReplicatorX Essentials Service and a custom ReplicatorX Design and Implementation Service so customers can cost-effectively unify their mixed legacy storage disaster recovery environment and put the disaster recovery copy to active business use.