NetApp has reached the historical milestone of deploying more than 150,000 unified storage systems.
The company is soon going to celebrate its eighth anniversary of introducing the industry's first unified storage system, and believes the milestone underscores its longstanding commitment of making unified storage a reality for customers.
Demand for unified storage
The requirement for unified storage increases as customers make a shift to shared infrastructure environments in order to reduce cost and operational complexity.
Manish Goel, executive vice president of products at NetApp, said their company kept on innovating even when several of their competitors resisted the technology evolution.
NetApp launched its ground-breaking hybrid storage system in 2002 and this solution offered a very different approach to NAS and SAN convergence.
"Our customers' adoption of unified storage over the past eight years validates our technology direction for next-generation virtualised storage architectures," said Goel. "We believe every storage solution provider will need to recognise and react to this significant industry trend and follow NetApp's lead to remain relevant."
IT and business benefits
NetApp notes analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) that says more than two-thirds of the organisations surveyed by them are either implementing or evaluating a unified storage infrastructure that consolidates NAS and SAN systems.
Terri McClure, senior analyst, ESG, said unified storage can improve the mobility and sharing of data between resources and users in a fluid and cost-effective manner. In addition to providing both IT and business benefits in almost any environment, these capabilities can also serve as the perfect back-end to today's dynamic and increasingly virtualised data centres.
There has been a significant change in the way data centres are being designed, built, and managed due to the trend towards server virtualisation and consolidation. Both data storage and data management have played a critical role in this transformation, because the secret behind successful virtualisation deployments lies in a shared, networked storage infrastructure that can eliminate the silos of storage associated with various application tiers.
NetApp adds that the demand of a shared infrastructure has further increased the importance of unified storage. The technology also enables customers to achieve storage efficiency rates of 85 to 100 per cent and delivers other benefits such as improved flexibility and scalability.