NetApp Sold Out Over A Petabyte Of Flash Cache Since Launch Of The Service

NetApp, a provider of innovative storage and data management solutions that accelerate business breakthroughs and deliver outstanding cost efficiency, has announced that since it introduced its new NetApp Flash Cache capacity in September 2009, its customers have purchased over one Petabyte or 'PB' of the service for improving their performance and storage efficiency, one PB being equal to 1000 Terrabytes or 'TB'.

The company helps its customers in optimizing their performance without adding complexity by incorporating flash memory as intelligent cache in its unified storage systems, which leads the customers to cut down both capital and operating expenses. As the customer adoption and industry standard tests establish, NetApp has been quite successful in helping customers make the most of their data centers with its Flash Cache service.

NetApp leverages solid state technology as intelligent cache rather than adding a storage tier of solid state disks for optimizing its performance for workloads such as file services, messaging, virtual infrastructure, and Online Transaction Processing databases. As the Flash Cache modules are easy to install, they need no ongoing administration and automatically cache data that is under high demand so that the data can be read at least 10 times faster than hard disk drives, and the storage system costs are cut down by around 50 percent for mainstream applications.

Deploying a single Flash Cache module, enterprises can achieve performance equivalent to dozens of high-performance disk drives, which enables them to configure storage systems with fewer, larger, and cheaper hard disk drives.

In the words of Patrick Rogers, Vice President of Solutions and Alliances at NetApp, using flash memory to automatically cache frequently accessed data gives customers the speed and accessibility they need without sacrificing simplicity and efficiency. Rogers noted that NetApp's customers have validated company's distinct approach to solid state technology by purchasing more than 5,000 caching modules so far, and buying Flash Cache with nearly 20 percent of the systems for which it was available.

Apache Corporation is one of the NetApp customers that saw real-world benefits from Flash Cache. The $29.53 billion independent energy company is engaged in exploring, development and production of natural gas, crude oil, and natural gas liquids, and is emphasizing its exploration and production efforts for meeting growing customer demand. It deploys a collaborative, high-performance 64-bit Windows environment or performing intensive geologic and seismic modeling, making its data volumes grow seven times to become 3.5PB within the last four years. The company leverages Flash Cache to optimize its exploration efforts and shorten the time it takes to get product to its customers.

According to Bradley Lauritsen, Manager, Exploration Computing at Apache Corp., decreasing company's time to discovery is vital to Apache's continued success, and it needs solutions that can keep up with the pace and scale of exploration and give it a competitive advantage.

Recently this month, NetApp introduced latest version of SANscreen 6.0, its storage management solution that helps service providers and enterprises to optimize storage efficiency and performance across their entire virtualized infrastructures.