CALIFORNIA, USA: Close to its three-year alliance, announced six-months back with Microsoft, NetApp recently announced tight integration with Microsoft technology to ease virtual environments management that include NetApp storage and build internal and public clouds.

Garth Fort, general manager, Systems Center Marketing, Microsoft Corporation. "Together, we are offering customers an optimal solution to manage their virtualized infrastructure by tightly integrating NetApp's storage efficiency technologies with System Center."

Also Read: Cloud will replace IT team with SI: Simon Green

Building on Microsoft's management framework, NetApp is unveiling a new management pack that enables Microsoft customers to manage NetApp storage efficiency technologies.

It will also cater to self-healing capabilities with Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager. NetApp ApplianceWatch Pro 2.1 includes new Pro Tips that provide granular control and include auto remediation for common storage utilization, replication, and configuration issues that can affect Hyper-V virtual machines.

In addition, Microsoft customers can now create automated reports, troubleshoot storage issues, and view mapping of storage to individual VMs via Microsoft System Center Operations Manager.

Through this tight integration, NetApp now offers rapid provisioning and cloning of Windows PowerShell cmdlets for the Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit, which provides a foundation for building private clouds.

For the Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit for hosters (DDTK-H), which provides a foundation for building hosted clouds, NetApp can deliver scripts that leverage the new NetApp Windows PowerShell cmdlet library for automated failover and rapid provisioning and cloning.

The NetApp Windows PowerShell cmdlet library allows users to easily invoke the capabilities of NetApp storage solutions via Microsoft System Center, or similar tools.

"As part of our strategic alliance, NetApp and Microsoft continue to deliver on our promise to help customers transform their data centres to achieve greater efficiencies, increase agility, and respond faster to changing business needs," said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Products, Alliances, and Solutions Marketing at NetApp.