Guest Blog by NetApp: Great Ideas + Fast Execution = Innovation Hosters Can Monetize

From the Dynamic Data Center Alliance blog:

The Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit for Hosters (DDTK-H) has been gaining mindshare since launching last year as Service Providers look for guidance to create private and public cloud offerings based on Microsoft's Hyper-V with integrated management via System Center.

For technology partners like NetApp, working through the Dynamic Data Center Alliance offers a great way to quickly contribute IP to the DDTK-H community, enhancing the integration of advanced virtual storage and data management functionality so hosters realize a faster time to market for affordable enterprise-class service offerings for SMB's.

NetApp is embracing the DDTK-H and our first solution integrating SnapMirror, our storage based replication product, delivers automated disaster recovery (DR) and was showcased at the MS Hosting Summit last month.  Bob Muglia demonstrated the capability during his keynote, showing live failover of hosting partner nGenX's Hyper-V environment between a production data center in Indiana and a secondary data center 470 miles away in Wisconsin. We talked with many hosting executives at the event and the consensus was that it was an innovative solution and a great kickoff to the NetApp-Microsoft collaboration around DDTK-H.  The PowerShell code and configuration guidance that represent this initial work are published on codeplex.  A case study of the nGenX implementation and Microsoft's press release give further context.

Going forward NetApp will aggressively expand our contributions to the DDTK-H.  The Microsoft Solutions Engineering team at NetApp is already testing additional support for Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV).  This provides additional local datacenter service level availability while still enabling the long distance DR.  Another imminent addition integrates SnapManager for Hyper-V, providing policy based backup and recovery for both standalone and CSV Windows environments. 

As we lay the Hyper-V and NetApp foundation for Service Providers and Hosters through DDTK-H integrations, we're highly focused on enabling best of breed solutions through PowerShell implementations for rapid deployment and reuse.  We'll be publishing the CSV and SnapManager for Hyper-V extensions to this solution before Microsoft TechEd next month.

At TechEd NA 2010, we will also release rapid provisioning for the Dynamic Infrastructure Toolkit for System Center enabling enterprises to build private clouds. To learn more please stop by to meet our team at NetApp booth #801.

Lee Gates
Sr. Manager, Microsoft Solutions Engineering
NetApp