NetApp Announces Verified Architecture for VMware Private Cloud

On August 23rd, NetApp confirmedthey are planning to offer a new service on top of their Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) solutions; NetApp Verified Architecture (NVA) for building a VMware Private Cloud. Using known and trusted VMware toolsets, the NVA provides a blueprint for a private cloud. They plan to offer demos at VMworld at booth 1036 and are encouraging interested parties to schedule private demonstrations ahead of time.

On August 23rd, NetApp confirmedthey are planning to offer a new service on top of their Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) solutions; NetApp Verified Architecture (NVA) for building a VMware Private Cloud. Using known and trusted VMware toolsets, the NVA provides a blueprint for a private cloud. They plan to offer demos at VMworld at booth 1036 and are encouraging interested parties to schedule private demonstrations ahead of time.

News about NetApp's new offering has been leaking out since CRN broke the storyearlier this month. NetApp storage enables backup and recovery, storage analytics, storage orchestration, storage services management, and storage policy management inside vCloud Director. With this tight-knit integration with vCloud Director, a storage as a service (StaaS) offering can be created that integrates into the VMware IT as a service (ITaaS) model.

For hardware, it looks like NetApp Verified Architecture (NVA) is planned to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL5) servers that run the VMware vCloud Director software. Multiple cloud cells form the VMware vCloud Director cluster. The vCloud Networking and Security solution is fully integrated with Cisco Nexus 1000V switches to provide single-pane-of-glass firewall rules for configuration and enforcement.

VMware integrated resources include:

• vSphere resources such as; vCenter Server instances, VMware ESX hosts, resource pools, datastores, and vNetwork Distributed Switches (vDSs)
• vCenter Chargeback to customize cost models
• VMware vCenter Server integrated with VMware vCloud Director and vShield
• vCloud Networking and Security
• vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) integrated with NetApp OnCommand Workflow Automation to provide storage services for cloud environments.
• vCenter Operations Management Suite (vCOPS) provides performance-monitoring capability to the virtualized infrastructure.
• vCenter Update Manager

NetApp provides many of the backup and recovery tools such as:

• NetApp FlexClone storage technology to replicates data volumes and datasets as transparent, virtual copies
• NetApp Snapshot point-in-time copy technology for data protection
• NetApp Snap Creator provides the ability to back up and recover vApps in a vCloud Director environment by using Snapshot copies.
• NetApp SnapMirror, a NetApp for data replication

To help with administrative tasks, NetApp uses Organizations as fundamental groups in VMware vCloud Director. An Organization contains users, the virtual applications (vApps) they create, and the resources the vApps use. An Organization can be a department within a company or an external customer to which a consumer provides cloud resources.

All of this sits on top of NetApps HCI offering which started shipping earlier this year. NetApp gives customers the tools to allocate capacity and performance independently for every application; as well as adjusting the allocations as workloads shift or needs evolve. NetApp aims to allow customers to automate customized storage provisioning as part of a self-service portal.

NetApp

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