Network Appliance has strengthened its relationship with VMware to collaborate on joint engineering, marketing, service, and support.

The NetApp-VMware relationship is designed to enable the two companies to work on joint engineering solutions for advanced application mobility, backup and recovery, and disaster recovery. Together NetApp and VMware are focused on making virtualised server, desktop, and storage infrastructures operate seamlessly to deliver agile, available, and cost-effective IT environments to enterprise customers.

Both companies are now working together to create an enterprise-class support agreement that streamlines case handling. Plus, the companies are defining joint best-practice blueprints designed to enable NetApp to work with VMware professional services and partners to deploy optimised server-to-storage virtualised environments.

According to Tom Georgens, executive vice president and general manager of Enterprise Storage and Product Operations at Network Appliance, “The VMware infrastructure combined with NetApp storage virtualisation solutions allows customers to experience increased resource optimisation in a virtualised environment. Not only can customers increase the utilisation of their individual server and storage resources, but they can increase the utilisation of their complete  infrastructure, including power, cooling, space, and people, while enjoying the robust and simple-to-use data management and protection capabilities that NetApp offers. These capabilities are available now in our joint sales projects and our future work will make the combined solutions even better.”