Microsoft Help

Microsoft Help, BANGALORE, INDIA: NetApp, on Monday announced partnership with Microsoft? to bring enterprise-class data protection services for small- and medium-size businesses (SMBs) by leveraging the Microsoft Dynamic Data Center Toolkit for Hosters. Although enterprise-class data protection has historically been too expensive for most small- and medium-size businesses (SMBs) to implement themselves, NetApp and Microsoft now enable service providers to offer enterprise-class data protection to their SMB customers.

The Dynamic Data Center Toolkit provides sample code and guidance for building cloud services powered by Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V and the Microsoft System Center Suite.

NetApp is currently the only storage vendor to integrate with the Dynamic Data Center Toolkit, enabling service providers to leverage NetApp's integrated data protection capabilities such as disaster recovery, clustered failover, and backup and recovery.

These solutions would enable service providers to expand their service offerings to accelerate their business, while offering and meeting stringent service-level agreements (SLAs) for their customers. Additionally, NetApp storage efficiency capabilities help service providers reduce their costs―savings that are passed along to SMBs, said a press release.

"SMBs are demanding enterprise-class disaster recovery solutions, and hosting service providers are in a tremendous position to fill that demand as more SMBs move toward hosted IT services," said John Zanni, general manager of Worldwide Hosting for the Communications Sector at Microsoft.

Patrick Rogers, vice president of Solutions and Alliances Marketing, NetApp added that till date small- and medium-size businesses haven't been able to make the investments necessary to enjoy the benefits of robust disk-based data protection.

"Working with Microsoft, we are helping to address this gap by arming regional and local service providers with the ability to deliver cost-effective enterprise-class data protection services to their customers," he said.

To supplement today's announcement, NetApp also unveiled new consulting offerings and design guidance documentation for Microsoft environments, along with new capabilities to help service providers improve their SLAs.

The company has also published new design guidance documentation to give service providers best practices around rapidly and efficiently deploying as-a-service offerings for their customers.

The guidance helps service providers design and deploy cost-effective enterprise-class services that include, Exchange as a service, SharePoint as a service, Infrastructure as a service, Storage as a service, and Desktop as a service

Finally, to provide further assistance to service providers deploying NetApp data protection as a service (DPaaS), NetApp has partnered with InControl software to help service providers monitor and meet their customers' SLAs, the release added.

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