NetApp SnapManager Now for SharePoint

NetApp announced the immediate availability of NetApp SnapManager 2.0 for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, enabling customers to better manage their SharePoint Server environments to increase storage efficiency, reduce costs, and improve data protection in both physical and virtual IT environments.

“With the explosive growth of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 deployments—their number, their size, and the sheer importance of their data—comes a corresponding increase in the associated storage needs and potential challenges,” said Mark Peters, analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “Simply put, users ideally require two things of their data management solution: first, it should add value to their SharePoint implementation; and second, it should integrate the data into a scalable and flexible architecture. In a nutshell, those two things are what NetApp offers SharePoint users: by adding dedupe, tiering, flexible provisioning, and so on plus providing integration into its central management, backup, and recovery schema, NetApp can help them address both their scale and complexity issues.”

SnapManager 2.0 for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server automatically discovers and monitors all data associated with SharePoint Server farms and flags any new and/or unprotected data. This enables administrators to easily and efficiently provision storage as needed to support the growing SharePoint data environment without impacting system performance or business users. SnapManager can also be used to set up automatic backup policies that protect the data on an ongoing basis, resulting in increased storage efficiencies, higher storage utilization, and a reduction in management complexities and costs. Also, its ability to protect or recover any size database, ranging from an entire site down to one single document, can be done in just a matter of minutes for enhanced data protection and availability.

Additionally, SnapManager 2.0 for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server enables customers to streamline development and testing for their customized SharePoint Server environments, further reducing development time and expenses. This functionality, which leverages NetApp FlexClone technology, empowers customers with the ability to develop a customized portal to meet their specific SharePoint Server needs and test it in a safe environment without risking impact to operations. It also allows customers to make full production test copies in minutes with minimal additional storage space needed. Furthermore, integration with NetApp Protection Manager and SnapMirror technologies provides added data management and disaster recovery capabilities of business-critical SharePoint Server data. Added flexibility is provided through its support of virtualized IT environments.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server customers can enjoy further storage savings and efficiencies by leveraging additional NetApp technologies such as Snapshot, FlexVol, and deduplication, which are all available through NetApp’s unified storage architecture. For example, NetApp’s deduplication technology can help customers reduce their storage costs on both primary and secondary storage by an additional 30% to 40%.

“Due to the sheer increase in data managed by Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, protecting that data has become both more important and more challenging,” said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Solutions Marketing at NetApp. “NetApp SnapManager 2.0 for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 improves data protection, while reducing overall storage costs. Microsoft and NetApp have tightly integrated our respective technologies to simplify the SharePoint Server administrator’s job, and create a great user experience.”