London, 5 July June 2010 – ControlCircle, the leading datacentre and managed services provider today announces it has been awarded Authorised Support Partner (ASP) and Approved Professional Services Partner (APSP) status by NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP), the storage and data management solutions provider.

ControlCircle provides a suite of innovative storage infrastructure for backup and recovery services, virtualisation and archiving solutions worldwide.

Damian Milkins, CEO ControlCircle comments: “We’re very excited about this partnership as NetApp is a name that has continually invested in and pushed innovation - bringing to market solutions that help service providers differentiate cloud services, accelerate time to market, and help achieve industry-leading cost and service-level benefits. With our NetApp certification clients will be able to buy maintenance directly from ControlCircle, safe in the knowledge that only qualified experts will design and deliver solutions in accordance with best practice.”

Unlike other storage vendors, NetApp does not deliver its own proprietary cloud services to compete with those of its service providers. However it does offer a full suite of design guides and capabilities geared to delivering value to cloud customers.  NetApp’s current cloud solutions include:

- NetApp Service-Oriented Infrastructure (SOI): leveraging NetApp storage as the foundation for all NetApp IT-as-a-service designs.
- Data Protection as a Service (DPaaS): a design guide that enables rapid deployment of DPaaS such as archive and disaster recovery (DR),
- Backup/Recovery as a Service (BRaaS): scalable, secure and pay-as-you go storage solutions, and
- NetApp Open Management: to leverage NetApp's storage efficiency and storage services automation capabilities accessed by NetApp's open Software Developer Kit (SDK) and Web services Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).

Speaking on ControlCircle’s accreditation, Pete Rawden, Partner Sales Director at NetApp concludes: “The NetApp partner programme focuses on providing best-in-class solutions that meet the specific needs of our customers, and deliver on time and on budget.  ControlCircle has fully embraced this and has invested heavily in developing their Professional Services to the point where they have now achieved NetApp Authorised Support Partner (ASP) status. Having a partner like ControlCircle who has invested in NetApp solutions for both customer-specific and shared services solutions and put such effort into providing industry-leading levels of customer service gives customers unrivalled levels of confidence in their NetApp products and associated business systems. ControlCircle is a NetApp partner of the highest order and we look forward to developing this partnership.”