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Within weeks of the massive earthquake and tsunami devastating lives, homes and infrastructure across Japan in March 2011, Softbank Telecom had not only enabled its displaced workers, customers as well as other organizations to resume operations but also fulfilled government energy requirements.

The company achieved this through its White Cloud desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) offering that had already served thousands of users before the disaster. During the crisis, Softbank Telecom extended the White Cloud DaaS to 14,000 Softbank Group employees and now, it delivers more than 22,000 virtual desktops within the Softbank Group alone.

"In addition to aiding business continuity, the underlying scalable NetApp storage infrastructure helped extend the reach of our White Cloud DaaS service and significantly decreased energy usage across locations," said Midori Morooka, manager of the Information System Division, Communication Service Management Department and Masaki Gonda, systems engineer of the Cloud Services Division, Cloud Services Department at Softbank Telecom Corp. "Combined with other measures and efforts by employees and affiliated companies, that reduced electrical power usage at Softbank Group headquarters by 39%."

"To keep their businesses running, they managed to deploy 1,000 desktops in a day, [something] they used to do in a week - through NetApp's agile data infrastructure. So, in a couple of weeks, they deployed 14,000 desktops," said Loh Ching Soo, country manager of NetApp Singapore. "They were also able to provision their internal cloud services within days to their customers and 37 million subscribers."

Loh cited the Softbank case study to highlight the economics and flexibility of moving data to the cloud. "According to IDC, data growth is about 50% every year," he said. "At this rate, by 2015, there will be an inflection point and the explosive data growth across [different applications, systems and siloes] will become unmanageable. The data becomes either a burden to the business managing or protecting it, or a propellant to the business."

For the latter to be realized, enterprises and cloud service providers need an agile, flexible and scalable data infrastructure that they can monetize from. Such an infrastructure should also accommodate any existing heterogeneous environment.

Two years ago, for example, Singapore property developer CapitaLand Ltd installed NetApp's V-Series open storage controllers with native support for SAN and NAS protocols to transform and manage its IBM and EMC systems, according to Loh. "Today, we are 95% of their storage environment driven by benefits of our agile data infrastructure," he said.

By combining data management with the architectural advantages of clustering, NetApp is promoting an agile data infrastructure that promises intelligent self-managed storage with functions to control, automate, and analyze data. For instance, virtual storage tiering allows a mixed-media storage pool to keep "hot" data on flash drives and less-active data on SATA drives. Fully automated with Flash Pools, the intelligence is built into the vendor's Data OnTap operating system. So, even with multiple and diverse workloads, complex data classification is not required.

"We combine solid-state disk (SSD) into this as well because the characteristics of some data require the SSD kind of performance," said Alvin Goh, senior manager of system engineering and professional services for ASEAN at NetApp. "Through virtual storage tiering that is seamless to the customer, we can provide both performance or quality and the cost advantage or efficiency."