NetApp Helps With Technical Applications

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- NetApp (NASDAQ:NTAP) today announced that Qualcomm, a leading developer and innovator of advanced wireless technologies and data solutions, has implemented NetApp Data ONTAP® GX as the computing storage platform in the company’s chipset design process. NetApp also announced new product enhancements that extend the capabilities of Data ONTAP GX.

In industries such as oil and gas, media and entertainment, and chip design, customers are leveraging Linux®, UNIX®, and Microsoft® Windows® compute clusters that run technical applications with demanding storage requirements. These demanding environments often lead to storage hot spots caused by increased activity along with escalating costs associated with managing the storage system. Data ONTAP GX enables customers to avoid these issues by providing a clustered file system that stripes data across all available storage resources, achieving the highest levels of performance. In addition, file system virtualization enables storage optimization and expansion, even across multiple tiers, without disruption to users or applications.

Qualcomm is constantly innovating with new chip designs that enable faster and better video, audio, gaming, and location-based services for wireless devices. During the electronic design automation (EDA) process, engineers run compute-intensive chip simulations. When the compute farm approached maximum utilization, Qualcomm found data input/output (I/O) to be a bottleneck that was impacting the pace of engineering development.

“We wanted to bring more projects online and not have data I/O be the bottleneck,” said Jeff Kennedy, IT engineer at Qualcomm. “We needed a solution that allowed us to bring more compute resources to bear on a single file system or directory structure. After testing various available options, we found that NetApp Data ONTAP GX did a great job of meeting our performance needs and providing the level of availability and failover required to maintain our rapid pace of technology development.”

NetApp Inc.