Today’s midsize enterprises face many of the same IT challenges as their larger counterparts, but often lack the same level of resources needed to adequately address them. As part of their ongoing strategic partnership, NetApp and VMware announced a new solution for midsize enterprises that helps them consolidate and virtualize their Windows® environments to deliver enterprise-class IT as a service.

NetApp and VMware are enabling midsize enterprises to deliver a new solution for Windows consolidation that improves productivity and scalability for midsize enterprises while significantly reducing IT costs. Customers can use the NetApp® FAS family and VMware vSphere™ to deliver application-aware data protection and disaster recovery technologies that were previously limited to a handful of midsize customers, helping them achieve enterprise-class availability for their Windows environments.

Customers can also use NetApp Virtual Storage Console and VMware vCenter™ Server to deliver integrated management for enhanced visibility, helping them respond faster to unplanned downtime and boost productivity.

Consolidation helps midsize enterprises eliminate application, data, and infrastructure sprawl and increase software utilization by cutting the physical servers needed by 80 percent and slashing the amount of storage needed in half. Server resources are pooled, and storage consumption is minimized with technologies such as thin provisioning, FlexClone®, primary storage deduplication, and space-efficient Snapshot™ backups.

Management helps midsize enterprises simplify management and reduce overhead by 50 percent or more by automating common tasks and by leveraging our tightly integrated, intuitive tools. NetApp Virtual Storage Console with VMware vCenter Server plug-in performs intuitive storage management tasks to simplify provisioning, configuration of default best practices, and other storage tasks down to a few mouse clicks.

Protection helps midsize enterprises cost-effectively increase availability and uptime through easy application-aware backup and disaster recovery, simple restores, and quick application failover, testing, and integration through the NetApp SnapManager® suite of products and security and business continuity solutions from VMware, including VMware vShield™, VMware High Availability, VMware Fault Tolerance and VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager. For example, SnapManager for Microsoft® Exchange can be used to restore an individual user’s mailbox.

Scalability helps midsize enterprises scale to meet evolving business needs with efficient virtual servers and unified storage that can enable changes to be made to Windows applications and infrastructure within minutes.