Microsoft, NetApp Partners over the Evolution of Dynamic Datacenters

Microsoft has partnered with NetApp in a new collaboration designed to kick up a notch dynamics datacenter capabilities for enterprise customers. The new partnership, set up for a period of three years, will see the two companies join forces in a variety of aspects, including product collaboration and technical integration. Per the agreement, Microsoft and NetApp will also boost efforts dedicated to joint sales and marketing. The Redmond company notes that together with NetApp will be able to provide customers new virtualization offerings, but also additional solutions related to private cloud computing, storage and data management.

The promise from the duo is that customers leveraging products from Microsoft and NetApp will be able to not only increase business efficiency, but also drive costs down. “Microsoft is committed to driving highly scalable dynamic datacenter solutions with innovative partners like NetApp,” noted Bob Kelly, corporate vice president of infrastructure server marketing, Server and Tools Business at Microsoft.

In collaboration with NetApp, Microsoft will make available new offerings built with a combination of technologies including based on Windows Server 2008 R2, Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, System Center and NetApp storage systems. In addition to the new virtualized infrastructure solutions, new products will be made available, focused on storage and data management, with Exchange Server, Office SharePoint Server and SQL Server at the core. The duo will also take the necessary steps to help corporate customers embrace the Cloud, with new cloud computing and hosted services solutions.

“Through the deeper integration of server, virtualization, management and storage technologies, Microsoft and NetApp customers can expect datacenter solutions that help them reduce costs, increase performance and reach new levels of efficiency,” Kelly added.

“The NetApp and Microsoft alliance has helped thousands of enterprise customers around the world do more with less,” said Tom Georgens, president and CEO of NetApp. “We are excited about the opportunity we have to build on this success and together help our mutual customers design and implement truly dynamic datacenters that can dramatically reduce costs and increase availability, flexibility and ease of use.”