NetApp announced several major enhancements to its NetApp E-Series platform to help its ecosystem of OEM partners more effectively serve their customers' growing big data requirements and also serve as the platform for many of NetApp's own big data solutions. The new features, which are available in the latest version of NetApp SANtricity software, the storage management software for the E-Series platform, include improved data protection, performance, and management capabilities. With the enhanced platform, OEMs have a storage foundation they can build on with confidence to deliver their own unique and innovative storage solutions to address their customers' high-performance needs and continue to grow their own business. Furthermore, these enhancements strengthen NetApp's position as an innovation leader and expand on the platform's already industry-leading combination of price, performance, and density.

Thanks to the added flexibility these new features deliver, OEMs can also leverage the E-Series platform to address other environments, such as virtualized infrastructures and Microsoft applications, providing them with the versatility to serve additional customer segments to help further expand their business opportunities.

E-Series Platform Provides High-Performance Storage Building Block
New features in the enhanced E-Series platform include:

• Dynamic Disk Pools (DDP) is an innovative new technology that provides customers with enhanced data protection and improves overall performance. DDP administers dynamic reconstructions of failed drives, providing customers with the ability to restore a storage system to optimal conditions following a drive failure eight times faster than with traditional RAID architectures. DDP can also reduce the impact on the performance customers experience while restoring from a drive failure by nearly 60%. This enhanced data protection technology enables big data customers to maintain business continuity and reduce overall storage system costs.
• Additional data protection capabilities are provided by enhanced NetApp SANtricity Snapshot™ technology that enables customers to schedule more frequent and flexible Snapshot copies, helping to improve overall recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) performance. The improved RPO and RTO performance increases data availability and reduces the amount of time and money an organization needs to allocate to recover valuable information.
• VMware vStorage APIs for Array Integration is now available across the E-Series platform. This provides customers with tighter integration between the storage array and VMware tools to help manage their storage environments. The added integration offers customers in virtualized environments increased flexibility, more efficient use of server resources, and increased performance and scalability.
• Thin-provisioning capabilities enable organizations to enhance overall efficiency by increasing storage utilization and reducing administrative costs.
• Active-active LUN ownership enables customers to standardize and simplify system configurations since LUN ownership to each controller does not have to be performed manually. This feature also balances the load automatically across both controllers, which helps optimize performance.