NetApp like to think of themselves as a software company. You see it is their software that makes their range of SAN storage appliances so feature rich, and puts them ahead of their competitors.

Unlike most vendors, all of NetApps SAN products have the same software, which means that a solution for a small environment can benefit from exactly the same functionality as their biggest customers such as Facebook, Yahoo, or BT.

Key NetApp Features:

• True Unified Platform – Only from NetApp
  NetApp systems can provide NAS (CIFS and NFS) & SAN (iscsi and Fbre Channel) on the same appliance at the same time.
  This allows complete consolidation of storage and maximizes flexibility.

• ISCSI & FC SAN – Free and activated
  Comes with every FAS2000 system

• Completely Scalable Solution –No forklift upgrades!
  Ability to grow from smallest to largest FAS system

• Inbuilt Data De-duplication - Free and included
  Removes duplicate files so less storage used
  Saves up to 95% capacity for full backups and Over 50% guaranteed on primary storage data sets used at the centre of a virtualisation solution

• Low customer total cost of ownership (TCO)
  Same operating system across the NetApp range, meaning no skills transfer as you grow. (Facebook, Yahoo, Oracle, BT etc all use the same technology as a FAS2000!)

• RAID DP (Double Parity) - Free and included
  RAID DP allows protection if two disks were to fail and offers excellent performance
  Saves up to 46% capacity over mirrored data or Raid 10

• Flexshare - Free and included
  Prioritise workloads so business critical applications get priority

• Thin provisioning and Flex Vol - Free and included
  Allows IT Managers to assign required storage the business needs
  Allows managers to Shrink or Grow LUN’s on the fly 
  20 -33%  typical capacity savings as capacity expansion purchases can be postponed by more efficiently using the current installation

• Snapshots - Free and included
  One of the most efficient in the industry which does not require “copy space” helps with local backup and delivers up to 80% capacity savings

• Advanced Features
  Snap Managers allow granular restore from snapshots of key applications.
  Flex Clone uses snapshot technology to enable instant provisioning, with minimum capacity usage for both virtual machines and database development.SnapVault allows snapshot based, ‘changed block replication’ to be used to create a backup archive vault on a second Netapp system.
  
  EAC Network Solutions believe NetApp to be the perfect storage partner for Education and Commercial customers alike. With such a rich feature set, and high performance the NetApp products are certainly a worthy technology to put at the heart of any environment. Although initially conceived to be more expensive, the Total Cost of Ownership due to the additional benefits such as Flex Volumes & Data deduplication allow for future savings where other solutions would need to be expanded earlier with additional disk capacity.