Blade Watch

NetApp

Research Triangle Park, NC—October 7, 2009— Today, NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) will hold a grand opening celebration to showcase its new energy-efficient dynamic data center located at the NetApp technology center in Research Triangle Park (RTP). The celebration also marks the 10-year anniversary of NetApp in the RTP region.

The grand opening ceremony event will be attended by Keith Crisco, secretary of the North Carolina department of commerce; Tony Caravano, deputy state director for U.S. Senator Kay R. Hagen; Alexandra Sullivan, technical development manager, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, ENERGY STAR; and key NetApp executives.

It’s always interesting to read about organizations talking about the Green or energy efficient data center, it’s great to see what combinations of hardware, software, best practice as well as environmental steps to minimize their data center power consumption and efficiency. The article illustrates what can be possible with the right combination of activities to reduce power, increasing the temperature of the data center, and fresh air cooling being examples as well as choosing more efficient hardware, and optimizing the operating system and application.

We need to be taking a top down approach across the platforms and business units, what’s eating our power, our resources, what barriers to success are we having in reducing our consumption to profit ratio (so to speak), what changes to operations or process do we need to make? It’s often the simple things that can lead to bigger savings, that Janet has no trust of the backups, means she keeps everything saved on the file share, she never deletes files, meaning IT have to provide more storage, for a small business storing word documents, it might not be a big deal, but take that across an enterprise and you could find, one aspect of your IT, your backup/restores could be costing you millions in storage requirement. With SnapShot, with tiering of the data where we only keep what we need directly online, and recover where necessary, we can reduce what you require to a minimum reducing power and storage cost. Not only do we need to look at the data center, it’s the server, the blade, the database, the network and crucially the application. We need to centralize data flow between applications, I was speaking to one IT Manager who had two databases doing similar things, but they had to be separate for political reasons, so we had two sets of data, two sets of backups to perform, to sets of storage to perform. There will always be the Chinese Wall scenario, where I can’t have one set of data on the same platform, but I wonder if we could not be smarter with our development, reduce unnecessary data duplication before it’s made, could we not be looking at the data flows, looking at the application architecture, reduce our data transfer to a minimum and our data storage? That I copy the trades to my deal capture system for processing and then submission to my back office team, means that we have in reality got three sets of deal/trade data until one of the systems runs out of space and a guy deletes ‘the old logs’, or runs the ‘clear down script’.

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