CDS builds its virtualization offerings on storage and data management solutions from NetApp. A number of unique technologies from NetApp make it the most compelling storage infrastructure solution set in the industry. NetApp’s Unified Storage Architecture provides the most flexible storage architecture in the market, with the ability to support SAN, iSCSI, and file services (NFS/CIFS) on a single, consistent, easy-to-manage platform.

Among the major storage providers, NetApp solutions are the easiest to deploy and manage. TCO studies from industry analysts, such as IDC and Forrester, demonstrate significant data center savings associated with NetApp’s ease of management, compared to competitive offerings.

The "secret sauce" behind NetApp's ability to rapidly backup and recover data lies with its Snapshot technology. Unlike competitive "Copy on Write" implementations, NetApp Snapshot technology is built into the WAFL file system, giving it unmatched efficiency. Up to 255 Snapshots per volume can be taken, while imposing zero performance degradation on the the storage subsystem. It is this high performance Snapshot capability that allows the CDS virtualization solution to rapidly recover every critical software element in the IT infrastructure: virtual machines, copies of operating systems, application binaries, all forms of data.

RAID-DP, the dual parity RAID technology from NetApp, is the most efficient RAID6 offering in the industry. In a virtualized environment, all critical elements (OS images, applications, and data) are being put on centralized storage. So the need to protect that storage is more acute than ever—you’re putting all your eggs in one basket, so you better really guard that basket! RAID-DP from NetApp protects against the double disk failures that can put your precious data at risk in a virtualized environment. Of critical importance, the performance overhead imposed by RAID-DP is 2-3%, compared to a performance hit of 20-30% imposed by competitive solutions.

Left unmanaged, a virtualized infrastructure can result in a great deal of wasted storage capacity. This waste is the result of the process by which new virtual machines are created, whether for servers or workstations. The template used to create each new virtual machine contains all the same operating system and application binaries as the machine they are modeled after, so the same blocks of data get written repeatedly. FAS de-duplication technology from NetApp that eliminates redundant copies of data and replicated files associated with a VMware deployment. Users can realistically expect to reclaim 80% of the space that would otherwise be consumed by redundant blocks of data.