Network Appliance (NTAP) today announced a donation worth $3 million to Tsinghua University. The gift of a NetApp unified storage solution complete with hardware, software, and service and support will be used to improve educational opportunities by providing a world-class academic computing infrastructure for students, faculty, and research staff.

"Our IT infrastructure makes Tsinghua University a better place for faculty and students because it places us on the leading edge of technology in an era when technology is a key contributor to the quality of university life and the future of our academic research," said Gong Ke, vice president at Tsinghua University. "Supporting student learning and future growth with a reliable and extensive network storage infrastructure enhances the community experience for everyone, and NetApp is an absolutely vital element of the infrastructure by bringing increased reliability and simplicity to our data needs. NetApp is also on the cutting edge of storage networking, and using NetApp at Tsinghua affords our researchers and students a great learning opportunity."

Enhancing student and faculty information management for innovative research and learning is vital to the university. To this end, the NetApp gift supports a personalized storage feature based on its powerful enterprise storage software, which will enable all students and faculty to have private storage space on the university system. Any individual will be able to access this "virtualized" entity via the Internet anywhere, anytime.

Students will also be able to take advantage of virtual learning with interactive coursework covering more than 1000 subjects synchronized with the university campus. These unique features are made possible by NetApp Data ONTAP 7G software, with advanced virtualization capabilities that enable customers to double storage utilization, dramatically increase performance for multi-application environments, and significantly reduce storage management costs for complex IT infrastructures.

The NetApp software is a dynamic virtualization engine, capable of aggregating physical storage components into self-optimizing capacity pools, enabling data management functions to be precisely tailored to individual application data sets based on customer needs.