Lab Validation Report – NetApp Distributed Content Repository

This report documents hands-on evaluation and testing of the NetApp Distributed Content Repository. The Distributed Content Repository was designed to extend object-based storage across geographies and provide a repository for unstructured content that is effectively infinite, practically immortal, and highly intelligent. In this ESG Lab report, the NetApp Distributed Content Repository is examined in the context of transparent connectivity to massively scalable, object-based storage for enterprises in data centers, branch and remote offices as well as in the cloud, via service providers. Simplified management of data and policy-based security and retention are also explored.

It is widely accepted within the IT community that data is growing and being archived at unprecedented rates. ESG research shows that the rate of growth is accelerating and predicts that the worldwide digital archive capacity will have increased by almost ten-fold from 33 Exabytes in 2010 to more than 300 Exabytes in 2015.1 This amounts to a 56% compound annual growth rate for the five-year period.

Some of the factors driving data growth include increasing data retention periods for compliance, corporate governance, and litigation support. Digitization of formerly non-digital assets and increasing business requirements to make digital assets available and easily accessible has had significant impact as well. This unparalleled explosion of data is breaking most of the paradigms in the storage industry. Long-established methods of handling data are no longer adequate to the tasks at hand—existing approaches cannot scale to the capacities required and provide universal access across geographically dispersed sites.

NetApp Distributed Content Repository is a comprehensive solution to an organization’s unstructured data storage and archiving challenges and an easy path to handling big content in a private or public cloud. The solution is built upon NetApp StorageGRID software, running on industry standard x86 servers (virtualized for availability and flexibility) and NetApp E2600 series storage platform.