Storage vendor NetApp is steadily getting more and more involved with big data. Earlier this month the company debuted an integrated box that is built to run Hadoop, and shortly thereafter announced a significant partnership with Infineta.

Infineta makes software that reduces latency in big data environments, in which even the most minute networking delays can have a big and much more noticeable impact on performance. Now that the company is a part of the NetApp Alliance Partner Program, its solutions will be used to speed up a number of additional processes: the SnapMirror replication and SnapVault backup recovery functionality that NetApp offers with its hardware. The two firms promise a performance increase of up to 85 percent.

“Big Data is not only transforming how information is used, but also how infrastructure is architected,” says Wikibon Sr Analyst Stu Miniman. “NetApp is attacking the scale-out and distributed environments and technology partnerships such as the recent announcement with Infineta Systems enable these new generation of Big Traffic solutions. Infineta has designed WAN Optimizations from the ground up to tackle the new generation of high bandwidth distributed solutions.”

The Data Mobility Switch, Infineta’s flagship offering, offers a number of other advantages to NetApp customers thanks to this unique approach. DMS mitigates WAN congestion and loss to a great extent, and its data reduction capabilities supplement ONTAP built-in dedupe.

ONTAP is NetApp’s storage OS. The latest version was released less than a week ago, bringing with it an impressive line-up of enhancements. Scalability has been improved along with a number of other aspects thanks to more automation, and security is also something that the newest edition of ONTAP addresses. NetApp teamed-up with Cisco and VMware to add a feature that segments data in virtualization environments with the goal of adding another layer of protection.