Enterprise Application Solutions

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.

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.

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.