NetApp Ushers in Next Wave of Data Centre Transformation

Sunnyvale, Calif. - February 12, 2008 -- NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) today announced new products and capabilities as part of the NetApp® Manageability Software Family to enable customers to transform their data centre architectures. Today's announcement is driven by NetApp storage innovations for virtual servers that will help customers improve their IT infrastructure and processes. Enterprise customers are undergoing significant data centre transformations to enhance IT flexibility and efficiency as server virtualisation moves into broader deployment. To enable this transformation, NetApp is providing customers a proven storage platform for virtualised environments to achieve increased service levels, higher asset utilisation, and greater data centre power, space, and cooling efficiencies.

"NetApp will be a major catalyst in enabling customers to capitalise on the next generation of data centre infrastructure," said Jay Kidd, chief marketing officer at NetApp. "Today we have established a lead in delivering virtualisation solutions and services that help customers transform their current IT architectures and amplify the impact that IT operations have on their business. The combination of server virtualisation technologies from VMware, Microsoft, Oracle, and Citrix with NetApp's networked storage solutions is dramatically improving data management and providing customers a path to creating a transparent infrastructure."

"Our research indicates that IT departments are continually challenged to do more with less, making it increasingly difficult to manage infrastructure complexity while at the same time meet service level agreements and increase staff productivity," said Roger Cox, Research VP, Gartner. "Customers are looking for an architectural approach that will deliver near instant response to business unit requests, automate the most labour intensive tasks, and scale infrastructure transparently over time."

Today's news further strengthens NetApp's unified data management platform with the following new innovative software solutions to drive customers' data centre transformation:

SnapManager® for Virtual Infrastructure-SnapManager for Virtual Infrastructure enables customers to protect their VMware® environments with automated data protection and recovery of their virtual machines. SnapManager for Virtual Infrastructure dramatically reduces human error and increases server utilisation for application workloads by eliminating the interruptions and performance impact caused by traditional server-hosted backups and restores. As a result, customers can protect their data more reliably.

SnapManager Compatibility with VMware-All Windows-based SnapManager products are now VMware compatible, providing customers the ability to manage data within virtual machines and take full advantage of the application-specific data management capabilities provided by NetApp's SnapManager products. Versions are available for Exchange, SQL, SharePoint, and Oracle. By extending SnapManager capabilities to virtual infrastructures, customers now have common data management tools for both their virtualised and physical server environments. These innovative products will also help accelerate deployment of existing Windows applications into new virtual server environments.

Provisioning Manager-Provisioning Manager provides policy-based automation to speed up existing provisioning processes, improve capacity utilisation, and reduce human error that results in data loss. As a result, storage administrators can eliminate the complex series of manual steps normally associated with provisioning storage in both virtual and physical server environments. This simplifies training for IT staff and liberates these valuable personnel to work on more strategic IT priorities.

"VMware and NetApp give us the best of both worlds, running virtual applications and storing the images of virtual machines on NetApp hardware," said Ed Grassie, director of Technology and Infrastructure with BBM Canada, which provides broadcast measurement and consumer behaviour data to Canadian broadcasters, advertisers, and agencies. "NetApp solutions supply the data storage power while VMware enables us to distribute data and processing the way that we want. NetApp enables us to protect our data with immediate mirroring to remote systems to support disaster recovery. This provides extra time so we can either deliver the data earlier to customers or recover from other issues or problems along the way."

Significant enhancements to NetApp's Protection Manager provide seamless protection of virtualised environments. In addition, updates to NetApp's Data ONTAP® operating system add expanded support for multivendor virtualisation and extend deduplication benefits to customers with NetApp V-Series and MultiStore® systems. Furthermore, Data ONTAP SMI-S Agent, which conforms to the SNIA Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S), is now available to support the entire line of NetApp FAS systems and NetApp V-Series virtualised storage systems. These enhancements extend customers' ability to meet increasingly diverse storage and data management requirements with a single, familiar, easy-to-use data management platform.

NetApp Improves Storage Efficiency in Virtualised Environments
NetApp's high-performance storage solutions were specifically developed to transform data centre technology into a competitive business advantage. As a result, many NetApp customers are realizing significant storage efficiency savings as part of their data centre transformation. In a recent study by Oliver Wyman, Making Green IT a Reality: Customer Perspectives on the Impact of Storage Vendor Decisions on Power, Cooling, & Space in Enterprise Data Centre (http://media.netapp.com/documents/ar1054.pdf), customers using NetApp, EMC CLARiiON, and HP EVA systems concluded that innovative NetApp technologies such as deduplication, thin provisioning, RAID-DP™, FlexVol®, and Snapshot™ dramatically reduce the amount of power, cooling, and space needed in their data centres. Customers found that NetApp requires 50% less raw storage and rack space and uses 51% less power and heat load per usable terabyte.

"Our biggest challenge was controlling our data growth while at the same time meeting customer service levels," said Chris Rima, supervisor, IT Systems, Information Services, with Tucson Electric Power. "We undertook an ambitious project to virtualise our IT infrastructure and we needed a storage system that would deliver data protection for our rapidly growing virtual storage environment. NetApp delivered fast, cost-effective backup and restore of our virtual machines and enabled us to quadruple our storage capacity without increasing administrative headcount, saving at least US$2 million over a three to five year period. Most importantly, we have streamlined operations and significantly improved client satisfaction by reducing backup and recovery time, reducing time required to provision new servers or roll back test and development environments, thus shortening lead time for new applications and improving availability and performance of server-based applications through the integrated use of NetApp and VMware technologies."

New Virtualisation Professional Services
In addition to today's product news, NetApp announced the following new virtualization professional services to accelerate customers' data centre transformation:

Virtualisation Assessment-Provides customers with guidance on how to start benefiting from a virtualised platform

Virtualisation Architecture Planning-Helps customers design the most efficient server and storage infrastructure for their unique environment and business needs

Server & Storage Virtualisation Services-Guides customers as they build the optimal server platform based on VMware technology and a set of turnkey service offerings

NetApp Authorised Professional Service Partner Program
NetApp is also strengthening its commitment to help channel partners provide the highest levels of quality and consistency with a new Authorised Professional Service Partner Program. With this program, partners now have the ability to sell and deliver their own brand of professional services for NetApp solutions utilising NetApp best practices, tools and methodologies, comprehensive training, and implementation backup support. Partners in this program will be uniquely positioned to serve as trusted advisors for a complete solution set and to deliver maximum value to NetApp customers. For more information, please see today's separate press release at: http://www.netapp.com/us/company/news/news_rel_20080212b.html.

Additional Resources
For an example of how NetApp is helping customers with their data centre transformation, read how NetApp created its Kilo Client lab, the world's largest commercial computing and storage grid architecture. Information is available in today's separate press release at http://www.netapp.com/us/company/news/news_rel_20080212a.html and the NetApp Kilo Client technical case study located at http://media.netapp.com/documents/tr-3566.pdf.

In addition, NetApp's own IT organisation reduced the space, power, and cooling in its data centre and avoided the need for a US$5 million data centre expansion project. To learn more, read the NetApp case study at http://media.netapp.com/documents/tr-3566.pdf. Best practices are also available in a white paper, 10 Techniques for Improving Data Centre Power Efficiency, which details how to reduce power consumption through innovative facilities design. Visit http://media.netapp.com/documents/wp-netapp-data-center-power-efficiency.pdf to learn more.

Visit NetApp TechTalk Online Events at http://www.netapp.com/au/company/events/techtalk/podcasts-au.html for a podcast with Jay Kidd, NetApp's chief marketing officer, who shares his perspective on customers' data centre transformation and recommendations to get started; an interview with Ralph Renne, site operations manager at NetApp, discussing NetApp's own data centre project to improve data centre power efficiency; and a podcast with Greg Ferguson, solutions development manager at NetApp's Virtualisation and Grid Infrastructure Business Unit, discussing NetApp's innovative Kilo Client lab.

NetApp TechTalk Webcast
NetApp will host a Webcast, Transform Your Data Centre, on Thursday, February 26, from 11:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m. Pacific Time. To register, go to http://communicate.netapp.com/forms/verify?seminarID=20080226WOD.

Pricing and Availability
All customer pricing for products described in this press release is available from NetApp sales or reseller partners. SnapManager for Virtual Infrastructure, Provisioning Manager, Protection Manager, and Data ONTAP 7.3 are expected to be available in spring 2008. New virtualisation services and the Authorized Professional Service Partner Program are available immediately.

About NetApp
NetApp is a leading provider of innovative data management solutions that simplify the complexity of storing, managing, protecting, and retaining enterprise data. Market leaders around the world choose NetApp to help them reduce cost, minimise risk, and adapt to change. For solutions that deliver unmatched simplicity and value, visit us on the Web at http://www.netapp.com/au/.

"Safe Harbor" Statement under U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995" The statement regarding availability of SnapManager for Virtual Infrastructure, Provisioning Manager, Protection Manager, and Data ONTAP 7.3 in spring 2008 is a forward-looking statement with the meaning of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements include any statements regarding future events or the future financial performance of Network Appliance Inc. that involves risks or uncertainties. In evaluating these statements readers should specifically consider various factors that could cause actual events or results to differ materially form those indicated, including without limitation, ability of third parties to deliver products and components on a timely basis, customer demand for products and services, customer acceptance of product architectures, increased competition, and other important factors as described in Network Appliance Inc. reports and documents filed from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recently submitted 10-K and 10-Q.

NetApp, the Network Appliance logo, Data ONTAP, FlexVol, MultiStore, and SnapManager are registered trademarks and Network Appliance, RAID-DP, and Snapshot are trademarks of Network Appliance Inc. in the U.S. and other countries.

Media Contact:
Rachel York
Max Australia
Tel: +61 2 9954 3492
rachel.york@maxaustralia.com.au