AUSTRALIA, Sydney.- 6 March 2007 - Network Appliance, Inc. (NASDAQ:NTAP) today extended its data centre portfolio with the addition of its newest midrange platforms, the NetApp® FAS3040 and NetApp V3040 series. Aimed at making enterprise data centre management easier, these systems, combined with Data ONTAP® 7G software, offer flexible and feature-rich unified storage solutions and exceptional price/performance for data-driven business applications such as Oracle®, SAP, and Microsoft® Exchange. The FAS3040 and V3040 systems are also powerful additions to the company's technical applications infrastructure, providing robust storage for design, automation, and other data-intensive needs. Future Data ONTAP GX support can also be leveraged on these systems for customers who require scale-out solutions.

NetApp is the fastest growing company in the SAN market and continues to hold the leading share in both NAS and IP SAN/iSCSI markets.¹ For NetApp, the FAS3040 and V3040 represent additional market opportunities as the company extends its enterprise lineup and adds more functionality and capability for FC SAN environments. The new systems provide customers with greater storage choices and give them the flexibility to tailor their infrastructures and capital outlays to meet specific data needs.

"The FAS3040 and V3040 distinguish themselves as modular midrange systems that pack a lot of punch without punching a hole in our customers' budgets, the way competitive midrange solutions do. Customers told us they wanted more midrange options from us that deliver rock-solid SAN and NAS performance, increased data and application availability, ease of management, and extreme reliability-all at a compelling price. These latest systems are designed specifically with data-intensive business and technical applications in mind," said Patrick Rogers, vice president, Solutions Marketing at Network Appliance.

Craig Vershon, IT Manager at Newfield Exploration agreed. "We're thrilled with the decision to deploy NetApp FAS systems to meet our storage needs. With NetApp, we have a flexible, reliable, and easy to manage storage solution that is crucial to maintaining our data centre and meeting our business needs."

Just as the FAS3070 and V3070 provided a refresh of the FAS3050 and V3050 in November 2006, the new FAS3040 and V3040 completes the refresh of the widely deployed FAS3000 series storage systems by offering two times the performance and 50% more storage scalability than the FAS3020. As part of the unified NetApp architecture, these midrange systems support file services, FC SAN, IP SAN (or iSCSI), and multiple network configurations while offering scalability to higher-performance systems with seamless upgrades, all without requiring the "forklift" data migration needed by most other offerings currently on the market. Designed with enterprise availability and easy manageability in mind, the new systems increase reliability, accelerate time-to-market, simplify maintenance, and reduce storage infrastructure complexity, making them ideal for both business and technical application environments. Based on a 64-bit architecture, with up to 252 disk drives, 126TB capacity, and high-bandwidth I/O, including embedded 4Gb FC ports, the FAS3040 and V3040 address a price/performance sweet spot for customers managing a growing storage environment in which business agility is paramount.

The performance of the new entry-level midrange NetApp FAS3040 system distinguishes itself among the competition with:

• Higher-Performance SAN. Microsoft Exchange Solution Reviewed Program (ESRP) storage test results demonstrate support for up to 14,000 Microsoft Exchange users at 1.0 IOPs per user, 2,000 more users than comparable EMC storage systems.
• Superior Throughput. A recent SPEC_SFS benchmark demonstrated a maximum throughput of 60,038 IO requests per second, proving the new entry midrange NetApp FAS3040 delivers 38% higher throughput than EMC's highest-performing midrange NAS storage systems.
• Superior Overall Response Time (ORT). The same SPEC_SFS benchmark demonstrated an overall response time (ORT) of 1.17 ms per request at 60,038 IOPs, 23% faster than EMC's highest-performing midrange NAS storage systems.

The Exchange listing is representative of block-based (SAN) storage performance while the SFS benchmark result is indicative of file serving (NAS) performance. For more information on the ESRP results visit www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/exchange/2003/esrp.mspx. For more information on SPEC_SFS results visit www.spec.org/sfs97r1/results/res2007q1/

For customers with even higher performance and scalability needs, NetApp recommends the FAS3070 and V3070, which offer the highest SAN performance and data management capabilities for the most demanding application environments, whether business or technical.

"We are seeing more end users embrace midrange in the data centre," said Tony Asaro, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "This is driven by ease of use, cost effectiveness, compelling price/performance, and a rich set of data management software capabilities. Additionally, end users are finding that midrange storage systems are extremely reliable. With the relentless growth of data we can't keep doing business as usual and spend endless amounts of money on big iron."

In addition NetApp has extended its list of V-Series supported storage systems to include the EMC CLARiiON® storage family. This complements existing support for Hitachi Data Systems, IBM, and HP storage arrays, and expands the range of systems where the value of the V-Series family can be utilised.

Pricing and Availability
All customer pricing for products described in this press release is available from NetApp sales or sales partners. The FAS3040 and V3040 are available immediately.

Technical Information
Technical information is available online for these and other products. To receive ongoing technical updates and to learn more, with exclusive online member content, register for the NetApp Tech OnTap program.

About Network Appliance
Network Appliance is a world leader in unified storage solutions for today's data-intensive enterprise. Since its inception in 1992, Network Appliance has delivered technology, product, and partner firsts. Information about Network Appliance^TM solutions and services is available at www.netapp.com. NetApp, the Network Appliance logo, and Data ONTAP are registered trademarks and Network Appliance is a trademark of Network Appliance, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. All other brands or products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders and should be treated as such. ¹Leader in FC SAN and iSCSI according to IDC. Leader in NAS according to Gartner.

Contact:
Mark Heers
Network Appliance, Inc.
+61 2 9779 5623
Mark.heers@netapp.com

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