Mid-sized businesses with growing business demands, limited resources and unprecedented data growth turn to NetApp

New Entry Portfolio Priced and Packaged for Midsize Businesses and Channel Delivers Three Times the Performance and Simplicity, Greater Value, and Industry-Leading Efficiency

SYDNEY, Australia - 09 November 2011 - NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) today unveiled a powerful new platform to help medium-sized businesses address the increasing requirements to keep pace with growing business demands and to do more with fewer resources. The new NetApp® FAS2000 entry product line delivers improved value, simplicity and scalability to enable customers to start right and grow with the needs of their businesses.

"Medium-sized businesses are facing unique challenges as a result of increasing business demands and the need to do more with fewer resources," said Tom Georgens, president and chief executive officer, NetApp. "We understand that customers should not be forced to make a trade-off between affordability and 'good enough' technology. With solutions that are priced and packaged to address this growing market, NetApp is uniquely positioned to help our customers succeed and build a solid foundation that can expand and adapt as their business and priorities change."

Peter O'Connor, vice president of NetApp Australia and New Zealand, said, "Many mid-sized organisations have turned to virtualization to consolidate their IT infrastructure, maximise existing resources and improve cost savings. At the same time, the majority of these businesses are running legacy versions of business applications and can no longer postpone investing in their IT infrastructure to build an economical and solid foundation from which to grow.

"As data volumes continue to expand at explosive rates, the decisions these companies make today about their IT infrastructure play a critical role in their ability to thrive today and grow tomorrow. That is why we're dedicated to offering mid-size businesses a flexible, efficient technology foundation in the form of NetApp storage infrastructure."

Enhanced Medium-sized Business Portfolio Delivers Value, Performance, and Efficiency

  • Performance and Scalability: NetApp's powerful new FAS2240, the latest offering in NetApp's entry FAS2000 series, delivers two to three times more performance improvement for greater flexibility, allowing customers to maximise storage investments, support demanding workloads and add enhanced capabilities as needed as their business needs change.
  • Simplicity: NetApp OnCommand™ System Manager 2.0 is designed specifically for the IT generalist to simplify, control and automate both setup and ongoing management of NetApp storage. This simple and easy-to-use management tool is provided with the purchase of these systems to help customers improve their storage and service efficiency, boost productivity and reduce the impact of storage management on limited IT resources.
  • NetApp Data ONTAP®: The FAS2000 series runs the latest version of the Data ONTAP operating system to provide customers with a unified, scalable platform that supports multiple workloads and delivers the flexibility to meet their growing business requirements.
  • Unified, Scalable Architecture: NetApp offers a truly unified, scalable architecture that enables its customers to easily and affordably upgrade to higher-end systems and new capabilities without the need for forklift upgrades. NetApp's innovative unified platform is currently unmatched in the industry and is proving optimal in helping customers to meet current and future requirements for architecting scalable, efficient and flexible infrastructures.
  • Industry-Leading Efficiency: With NetApp, medium-sized customers benefit from the industry-leading efficiencies. While other storage vendors offer only one or two storage efficiency technologies, NetApp offers nine integrated technologies, which have helped customers save $11 billion and more than 4.6 exabytes of storage[3] in total.

Proven History of Success with Mid-sized Businesses

  • NetApp brings an established track record of success in the medium-sized enterprise segment and more than 10,000 medium-sized businesses turn to NetApp each year for their storage needs.
  • The company is widely recognised in the industry by notable third parties and has been nominated a top vendor in numerous categories for delivering outstanding customer value, innovative technology and product quality.
  • According to Forrester Research Inc.'s Market Overview: Midrange Storage, Q32011 report issued 29 August 2011, "NetApp provides the leading unified solution. It continues to expand its portfolio and grow within the market."
  • Storage Magazine[1] ranked NetApp the number one solution for virtualized environments, and the company also earned the publication's top spot in the Quality Award survey for midrange systems.
  • TheInfoPro[2], based on their unique methodology of one-on-one interviews with storage professionals, identifies NetApp as the lead vendor in use by midsize enterprises for optimization technologies including Solid State Cache and Online Data Reduction/Deduplication.

Industry-Leading NetApp Partner Program Is Critical to Fuelling Mid-sized Customer Success

  • NetApp's strategy to leverage diverse pathways for growth has played an important role in furthering the company's impressive success in the medium-sized business segment.
  • A key component of this strategy is NetApp's commitment to its vast ecosystem of channel partners, who serve as trusted advisors to the medium-sized business segment and provide NetApp with a critical pathway to these customers.
  • NetApp's enhanced product portfolio, pricing and packaging options optimised for medium-sized businesses, enable NetApp Partners to offer the best technologies and solutions to grow their own businesses, increase profits and help their customers succeed.
  • In fact, the Maia Strategy Group recently conducted a survey of channel resellers worldwide who are part of the NetApp Partner Program and who also partner with other storage vendors. According to the analysis:
    • The partners surveyed align with NetApp because of the strong value proposition that NetApp's technology offers medium-sized business customers.
    • These partners view NetApp as having superior technology for the medium-size market when compared to other vendors.
    • The study revealed that partners view NetApp products as highly competitive for the middle and upper end of the medium-sized business market, citing flexibility and adaptability across a range of systems as key advantages for NetApp solutions.

Supporting Quotes - Australia

  • David Witcombe, Manager, Information Communications and Technology, Geelong Grammar School
     "With the demands on our technology continually increasing, it's critical for us to know that we're working with a flexible, scalable system which is reliable and available. In our environment, delays and low productivity aren't acceptable. With the NetApp storage infrastructure underpinning the rest of our network, we are happy in the knowledge that we are operating in the most efficient, flexible environment available. We are in a great position to move into the future stages of technology requirements for GGS."
  • Ian Pearce, Chief Technology Officer, Envisian
    "When considering new technology strategies, a significant challenge faced by mid-size businesses is gaining the functionality enjoyed by large enterprises for an affordable cost that provides genuine return on investment. The ability to gain true efficiencies that can be driven back through the business adds a high level of agility to mid-size companies. With current economic conditions being difficult to navigate, we look forward to working with our mid-level customers to help them reduce their risk and strengthen their businesses moving forward."
  • Len Findlay, CEO, VMtech
    "Our customers in the mid-market are looking for more efficient ways to use technology to drive growth. We've been working with those customers to help them make smart, strategic decisions to ensure they are gaining true value and efficiency from their IT, that can be pushed back into the business and generate long-term benefits. NetApp's new midsize solution is another step in making sure we can deliver genuine return on investment to those joint customers."
  • Malcolm Cole, Sales Director, Xpanse
    "In this highly competitive market, mid-sized companies are continually working to maintain pace with growing business demands and maximise the return on investment from their technology resources. When combined with the fact that many IT staff members in these companies are generalists, our mid-size customers are looking for solutions to simplify the way they do business, while providing genuine IT efficiency. Xpanse, in conjunction with NetApp's new solutions, are well positioned to help mid-sized customers generate and gain significant business benefits through the successful deployment of NetApp technology."

International quotes

  • Brian Babineau, vice president, Enterprise Strategy Group
    "In today's challenging economic environment, it is very easy to focus on making IT buying decisions based on acquisition cost. Unfortunately, far too many midsize business realize that operational expenses involving system tuning, application integration, and solution availability can quickly outpace an initial investment. We consistently advise these organizations to consider IT infrastructure offerings that can support a variety of workloads allowing limited resources to achieve management economies of scale.
  • Chelo Picardal, Chief Technology Officer, City of Bellevue
    "As a growing, thriving metropolis with 35% annual data growth and limited resources, the City of Bellevue is constantly striving to do more with less and make the most of its IT investments. Our NetApp storage solution has enabled us to meet expanding business demands amid budget reductions. With NetApp we have gained outstanding performance, scalability and efficiency, resulting in better services to our customers - the city departments that serve our growing population of more than 122,000 residents."
  • Tim Torres, vice president, Technical Operations, Merced Systems
    "Our IT staff is comprised of a very small team of IT generalists supporting multiple functions across the organisation. As our business continues to grow, ease of use, reliability and automation are all key criteria that we look at as we evaluate any technologies we deploy. NetApp has met all of those requirements and delivered powerful capabilities, scalability and flexibility to help us control costs, maximise our investment and yield the highest payback."
  • Ken Danila, IT Operations Manager, VHB
    "At VHB, our primary focus is on helping our customers solve the nation's most complex transportation, land development and environmental infrastructure and development challenges. NetApp's storage solutions are central to connecting the two most vital assets for the success of our business: our people and our data. Choosing NetApp is one of the smartest decisions I have made at VHB and they have done a great job of addressing the medium-sized market with an enterprise-class solution that is simple, scalable and offered at an attractive price point."
  • Julie Parrish, senior vice president of Global Partner Sales, NetApp
    "NetApp's history of success in the medium-sized business market can be attributed to our strong and enduring partnerships. With today's announcement, NetApp is combining powerful solutions for medium-sized businesses with the best partner programme in the industry to create compelling opportunities for continued partner success now and into the future."

Availability and Pricing
As part of today's announcement, NetApp is offering new lower pricing options for both the FAS2040 and FAS2240 to deliver greater value and long-term savings, allowing customers to grow their business without outgrowing their storage investments. The NetApp FAS2000 series systems start at under AUD$10,000 and can be ordered today through NetApp's worldwide network of value-added authorised resellers, distributors and systems integrators. For more information, visit www.netapp.com/au/how-to-buy

Additional Resources

[1] Storage Magazine, "Quality Awards Survey for Midrange Systems," September 2011 and "Quality Awards: Enterprise Storage," March 2011
[2] TheInfoPro (a division of The 451 Group), "TheInfoPro Storage Study Technology Roadmap Report, Wave 15 - 1H2011"
[3] Data from My AutoSupport, a Web-based tool that offers a comprehensive view into the health, performance and storage efficiency of any NetApp storage system

About NetApp
NetApp creates innovative storage and data management solutions that accelerate business breakthroughs and deliver outstanding cost efficiency. Discover NetApp's passion for helping companies around the world go further, faster, at www.netapp.com/au/

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

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