Five Steps to an Agile Data Infrastructure1. Steps to an
Agile Data
Infrastructure
Identify Your Build Your Leverage Key Scale Your Protect
Business Needs Foundation Technologies Performance Your Data
How much do you know about your storage envi- Storage technology has evolved a lot. What was
ronment? Is that enough? With annual data growth impossible a year ago is likely possible today. Follow
rates around 50% (IDC), your storage choices these five steps to discover how you can build an ag-
determine how quickly you can get a new product ile data infrastructure to help your company be more
or service to market and, ultimately, how success- flexible and respond faster to market opportunities.
ful your company will be.
Let’s Get Started
Identify Your Needs
Start by addressing your biggest problem.
CAPACITY SCALE SPEED/PERFORMANCE
You can’t keep up with the grow- IT provisioning is too slow ERP rollout and changes take
ing amount of data Storage is too complex too long
You have problems integrating You’re spending too much time Making production copies for
data from mobile on maintenance business intelligence is too slow
Storage is not scalable You need to shut down applica-
tions when migrating data
Build Your Foundation
UNIFIED ARCHITECTURE
Whatever your main issue is, it is time to consider an agile data infrastructure. That means there will
a universal storage pool that can be accessed by no longer be a need for extensive change, capacity,
all protocols. Running all your workloads on one and performance management. You can change,
storage platform will radically simplify your envi- grow, or flex your infrastructure to meet your busi-
ronment and open the door to all the benefits of ness needs without any downtime.
Leverage Key Technologies
Clustered storage is the backbone of an agile operating system, so it is available at no extra cost.
data infrastructure. It gives you the flexibility to Clustering also makes it easier to use automation
scale your storage capacity without limits, move tools to increase your team’s productivity. But even
workloads to the right storage based on applica- with clustering, don’t forget the benefits of good
tion requirements, or upgrade your systems—all efficiency features. This is what you can expect with
seamlessly. Clustering comes in many shapes and NetApp.
forms. At NetApp it is part of the Data ONTAP®
CLUSTERING AUTOMATION TOOLS STORAGE EFFICIENCY
Nondisruptive operation: Use service automation and ana- Reduce your storage needs and
» Eliminate planned downtime lytics tools from NetApp® On- costs by 50% with NetApp stor-
» Dynamically move and access Command® software to manage age efficiency features:
data within or across a cluster and administer your environment » Compression
Operational efficiency: Free up time and resources to » Thin provisioning
» Scale from 2 to 24 nodes focus on more strategic tasks » Deduplication
» Mix different-size controllers in Use the AutoSupport™ tool to » FlexClone® technology
the same cluster minimize unplanned downtime » Snapshot™ technology
» Choose from a variety of flash
and HDD options
Support for:
» All NAS and SAN protocols
» Enterprise and technical
applications
» Secure multi-tenancy
» Virtualized third-party storage
Scale Your Performance
Scaling storage capacity without sacrificing tion performance based on your specific workload
performance is always a challenge. Flash allows requirements. Our flash technology is easy to install
you to do both. and won’t impact your data management. As an ad-
Use OnCommand® Insight to assess the per- ditional benefit, using flash will increase your overall
formance of your storage and see where flash storage efficiency. And flash is integrated with Data
is needed. You can add flash either at the disk, ONTAP®, so the hot data is always placed on the
controller, or server level to boost your applica- highest-performing media.
DISK CONTROLLER SERVER
Flash Pool: Flash Cache: Flash Accel™:
Combines the speed of SSD with Uses PCIe flash cards Has hardware-agnostic caching
the efficiency of HDD drives Supports caching of random software running on server
Supports caching of both reads Accelerates random reads for
random reads and overwrites Is cost effective a particular application in
Provides highest level of Increases performance of shared virtualized environment (great
availability storage infrastructure for business apps)
Is cost effective Reduces back-end storage costs
Increases performance of shared
storage infrastructure
Protect Your Data
Last but not least, all of these benefits can easily ONTAP®, which gives you maximum flexibility to
be wasted if you don’t protect your data. All the implement a solution.
data protection features offered are part of Data
INTEGRATED DATA PROTECTION EMBEDDED DATA SECURITY SECURE MULTI-TENANCY
Use Snapshots copies for local Role-based access control Isolate your data securely
backup Antivirus on board Maintain workload performance
Use SnapMirror® technology for Data encryption
replication
Use RAID-DP® technology to
protect against double disk
failures
Agile Data Infrastructure
When you get to this point, the importance of the say that your infrastructure is Intelligent.
characteristics of each system fades in comparison Being Infinite, Immortal, and Intelligent are the
to the characteristics of the whole infrastructure. three characteristics of an agile data infrastruc-
Although no individual system can scale infinitely, ture. The FAS3200 is an ideal building block for
your data storage infrastructure can. The same is an agile data infrastructure. Combining it with the
true of the durability of your data infrastructure— FAS2200 and the FAS6200 will provide you with
we call it “Immortal”. And with all of your manage- the ultimate in flexibility.
ment tasks happening automatically, we can also
Information provided by
© 2012 NetApp, Inc. All rights reserved. No portions of this document may be reproduced without prior written consent of NetApp, Inc. Specifi-
cations are subject to change without notice. NetApp, the NetApp logo, Go further, faster, AutoSupport, DataMotion, Data ONTAP, Flash Accel,
FlexClone, OnCommand, RAID-DP, SnapMirror, and Snapshot are trademarks or registered trademarks of NetApp, Inc. in the United States and/or
other countries. All other brands or products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders and should be treated as such.