Joint Archive Solution by NetApp and Symantec

NetApp announced integration of its archive and compliance solution with Symantec Enterprise Vault 8.0. Together, NetApp and Symantec enable customers to maximize storage efficiency and optimize protection of enterprise archived data to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) of archive environments by up to 60%1.

Symantec and NetApp collaborated extensively to develop a joint archive solution so customers can take advantage of the following key capabilities:

• Industry-leading deduplication—Enterprise Vault has optimized its support of NetApp deduplication. The combination of NetApp deduplication with Symantec Optimized Single Instance Storage gives customers a powerful solution to eliminate redundant data and dramatically reduce storage costs.
• Improved protection—Joint customers can take advantage of NetApp’s unique cascading Snapshot approach for end-to-end replication across the entire archive application stack. Customers can now increase application availability, dramatically reduce backup downtime, and significantly improve recovery times of archive applications and content.
• Simplified management—NetApp’s unified architecture enables customers to radically simplify their archive storage infrastructure with one management platform to reduce overhead and improve scalability and flexibility. Together with Symantec, NetApp is making critical archives more affordable and easier to manage.

Improved Storage Efficiency for Archive Environments
Customers use many criteria, including scalability and manageability, when choosing their archive platform. However, storage efficiency has escalated to become among the top evaluation criteria.

“Today’s economic uncertainty is accelerating customers’ needs for efficient storage,” said Brian Babineau, analyst with Enterprise Storage Group. “As a result of its efficiency benefits, deduplication is quickly becoming a de facto standard for storage environments. NetApp has focused on including this functionality across primary, backup, and archival data. Deduplication must be part of any effective archive strategy.”

Symantec and NetApp’s integration provides customers this storage efficiency with the ability to run both file single instancing and block-level deduplication at the same time. This integrated approach is part of the most complete suite of technologies for archive environments with deduplication, single instancing, thin provisioning, Snapshot, and RAID-DP. Competitive approaches from HP and EMC fail to either offer this level of functionality or match the full benefits of this integrated storage-efficiency approach. As a result, Symantec and NetApp are enabling customers to create a more affordable, flexible, and cost-effective infrastructure to address the rapid growth of their data archives.

Unified Architecture Delivers Simplified Management
Competitive data protection approaches require multiple devices, operating systems, and software tools to deploy a complete solution. NetApp’s data protection technology solutions offer customers the breadth and depth to address efficiency, complexity, and costs. With NetApp’s unique cascading Snapshot approach, customers can automate and synchronize backups and replication across the archive database, index, and content repositories. By integrating with Symantec Enterprise Vault, NetApp is further improving customers’ ability to quickly and easily recover their archive environments.

“Symantec and NetApp have enabled us to control our storage costs, improve service levels, and more readily address our compliance requirements,” said Steve Sampiere, CIO with Alliant Insurance. “When we looked to scale our archive over the next few years, the cost of the infrastructure was daunting. Symantec and NetApp will enable us to deliver greater storage efficiency and ultimately save data center space and money.”

“Archive storage is growing at a rate of more than 50% a year, so customers are continually struggling to control their storage budgets,” said Tim Russell, vice president and general manager of Archiving, Compliance, Storage Efficiency, and Security with NetApp. “Integration of Symantec and NetApp deduplication improves archive storage efficiency for our joint customers. With additional integration such as cascading Snapshot copies, customers can reduce not just storage acquisition costs but operating costs as well and, ultimately, maximize the value of their current IT infrastructures.”

“Customers are archiving across more than just e-mail to include file systems, SharePoint, and IM,” said Simon Jelley, senior director, Symantec Enterprise Vault product management. “With more information being archived, customers are looking to optimize their storage costs and resource allocation. Enterprise Vault 8.0 brings storage efficiency with optimized single instance storage and takes it a step further with integration to NetApp’s deduplication technology. Together, we are continuing to innovate and help customers realize greater value from their data protection and archive environments.”

Pricing and Availability
Customer pricing for products described in this press release is available from NetApp sales or reseller partners. Enterprise Vault 8.0 with support of NetApp deduplication will be available in January 2009. NetApp deduplication is available to new and existing customers at no additional charge.