NetApp, Microsoft Team Up To Streamline Data Center Management and Accelerate Cloud Computing

NetApp today announced tight integration with Microsoft technology to enable the growing number of joint customers and service providers to better optimize and evolve their infrastructure while dramatically reducing costs, streamlining management, and increasing business agility.

Customers can now use familiar Microsoft management tools to easily monitor and manage their virtual environments that include NetApp storage and build internal and public clouds. This tight integration between NetApp and Microsoft extends the broad strategic alliance developed to help customers transform their data centers to be more efficient, agile, and dynamic.

Building on Microsoft’s extensible management framework, NetApp is unveiling a new management pack that enables Microsoft customers to manage NetApp storage efficiency technologies, plus basic self-healing capabilities with Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager.

NetApp ApplianceWatch PRO 2.1 includes new PRO Tips that provide granular control and include auto remediation for common storage utilization, replication, and configuration issues that can affect Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). In addition, Microsoft customers can now create automated reports, troubleshoot storage issues, and view mapping of storage to individual VMs via Microsoft System Center Operations Manager.

Companies of all sizes are benefiting from the powerful combination of NetApp and Microsoft technologies. For example, WhiteWater West is achieving significant efficiencies through streamlined monitoring and management, while Avanade is successfully transforming its IT environment.

To help simplify the creation of self-service portals and automate management for public and private clouds, NetApp has integrated its best-of-breed technologies with Microsoft’s Dynamic Datacenter Toolkits (DDTKs). Through this tight integration, NetApp now offers rapid provisioning and cloning of Windows^® PowerShell cmdlets for the Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit, which provides a foundation for building private clouds. For the Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit for hosters (DDTK-H), which provides a foundation for building hosted clouds, NetApp can deliver scripts that leverage the new NetApp Windows PowerShell cmdlet library for automated failover and rapid provisioning and cloning. The NetApp Windows PowerShell cmdlet library allows users to easily invoke the capabilities of NetApp storage solutions via Microsoft System Center, or similar tools.