May 8, 2006 - Network Appliance, Inc.
(NASDAQ: NTAP) today announced a new line of products and services
designed to enhance customers' data management capabilities and to
unseat EMC and HP for leadership of open systems storage in the
enterprise data center. The expanded NetApp® portfolio offers
modular, transparent scalability for the largest data center
applications and consolidations; maximum flexibility to help
customers adapt to business changes; and the highest availability
of application data, ultimately enabling more productivity for IT
administrators and achieving the best overall total cost of
ownership. These offerings are aimed at enterprises that have vast
data requirements and demanding service-level agreements and that
operate large-scale Oracle®, SAP, and Microsoft®
enterprise applications. Unlike competitive frame array products,
the NetApp approach to storage simplifies storage provisioning,
improves utilisation of storage assets, and increases IT
productivity, hence delivering dramatically better business value.
Additional details are available online at
www.netapp.com/datacenterproven/pr.
Two new systems announced today include the FAS6030 and the
FAS6070, new flagship systems that greatly extend the breadth and
scale of the NetApp storage systems portfolio. An enhanced NetApp
Manageability Software family and new Fibre Channel (FC) SAN
capabilities also debuted today. In addition, two new services were
announced: Premium Support Services for the FAS6070 and Rapid
Deployment Services for Storage Implementation. Highlighting its
greater value in data centre environments, NetApp also unveiled a
Mercer study for data storage total cost comparison (
www.netapp.com/go/sap/2006/)
showing that in real-world settings with equivalent availability
and performance service levels, competitive solutions are between
55% and 260% more expensive to own than NetApp solutions.
Martin Cooper, chief technology officer at Arup, a world-renowned
engineering consultancy, agreed. "NetApp has clearly taken a
different and better approach to solve my data centre challenges.
From robust, flexible, and modular hardware to an intelligent and
automated software manageability framework, NetApp has consistently
proven it understands that I need minimum complexity and maximum
performance and that data availability is central to my business's
success."
Noel Levasseur, Executive Vice President at First American Bank, a
full-service bank with over 41 Chicago area locations and more than
$2 billion in assets continued, "NetApp storage solutions enable us
to provision and reconfigure our storage quickly giving us the
flexibility to adapt to our business needs. NetApp has taken a
different and better approach to solving my data center challenges
than previous suppliers. Due to complex configuration and
management we always ran out of storage space and never really
utilised the capacity within our SAN. Now with the NetApp solution,
we are able to increase our storage utilisation."
Dan Warmenhoven, CEO of Network Appliance said: "The world's
largest and most demanding businesses use NetApp solutions to
simplify their complex enterprise application and data
infrastructures. They have realised the advantages NetApp offers
from core production to test and development to departmental and
remote office. Customers no longer have to purchase large, complex
and expensive frame arrays to support their enterprise data
management needs. Our new FAS6000 series, new and enhanced
integrated management software, industry-leading FC SAN
infrastructure solutions, and robust set of new and enhanced
services and support offerings position NetApp as a clear leader to
help IT organisations achieve even greater returns and maximise
their resources. We offer the most scalable, cost-effective,
high-performance solutions available bar none. Market and customer
analysis shows that we are growing three times faster than the
industry average in enterprise application data centres and we have
seen greater than 90% growth year over year in Oracle, SAP, and
Microsoft environments. We are growing at 125% in FC SAN and we
offer up to 40% cost of ownership savings versus others in the data
center and high-end SAN space. NetApp is the clearly the data
management solution of choice for the enterprise data
centre."
Brad Nisbet, Program Manager with IDC said: "Data centre complexity
has gone through the roof due to the explosion of data,
infrastructure consolidation, mounting security concerns, as well
as compliance and regulatory needs. It is abundantly clear that
enterprise data centres are in need of proven solutions that can
simplify management, increase productivity, and give them the
flexibility to adapt to changing business needs."
New Products and Services
The
NetApp FAS6000 is the highest-end NetApp system,
extending the NetApp FAS line to a substantially higher level of
performance and scalability. The FAS6000 is designed to help
customers reduce the TCO of large-scale storage for business
applications. With NetApp Premium Support Services, customers can
enjoy always-on availability to meet expected and even increased
service levels. The systems scale to 500TB of capacity, a level
previously available only with the most expensive storage systems.
Unlike competitive high-end storage systems such as the EMC
Symmetrix, the FAS6000 has a modular storage design, making it
easier to deploy "as needed" to increase business agility and
reduce costs.
The FAS6000 is well suited for large-scale storage consolidation,
with the capacity to simultaneously support hundreds of SAN- and
NAS-based applications. The FAS6000 maintains consistent
performance for key workloads via new FlexShare™ software,
which allows administrators to set and dynamically change
priorities of various data sets. Maximum performance for the NetApp
FAS6000 is upheld even with frequent NetApp Snapshot™ copies
(for data protection and recovery) and/or using RAID-DP™, a
NetApp technology that helps prevent catastrophic data loss from a
double disk failure. Customers can recover application data and
provision storage, servers, and databases in minutes, not hours,
and enjoy simpler configuration and ongoing management, resulting
in less IT overhead and expense. More information and technical
details on the specific NetApp FAS6000 models are available at
www-uk.netapp.com/products/filer/fas6000_ds.html.
The enhanced
NetApp Manageability Software family is the
only data management toolset that actively manages data from a
business perspective. It automates, integrates, centralises, and
simplifies core workflows across IT administrator domains, enabling
improved data availability, enhanced productivity, and increased
storage utilisation.
Data centre storage administrators want to focus their time on
value-added tasks such as utilisation and performance that directly
impact their business. However, many find that they spend an
increasing portion of every day operating as a "help desk" and
responding to individual requests. Traditional approaches focus on
managing this complexity, but NetApp, with its integrated data
management approach, actually reduces complexity. The NetApp
Manageability Software family gives IT administrators the tools
they need to get rid of the storage "help desk" and allow storage
administrators to focus more on activities that drive value for the
business. In addition, it empowers system administrators, DBAs, and
application administrators to manage their own data within the
controls set by the storage administrator. The combination
dramatically simplifies existing IT workflows and increases the
flexibility of the entire IT operation.
The new NetApp Manageability Software family includes four suites
of management tools targeted at specific administrators in the data
centre: application, server, data, and storage. The net result is a
unique and powerful set of capabilities that delivers dramatic and
proven productivity gains to data centre customers. More
information and technical details on the NetApp Manageability
Software family are available at
www-uk.netapp.com/products/software/management-software-family.html.
Extended
NetApp FC SAN enterprise-class infrastructure
capabilities achieve massive scalability with minimal complexity.
NetApp FC SAN solutions help customers better adapt to changing
data centre needs, achieve superior data management, and experience
the lowest TCO. This is made possible through instantaneous FC SAN
provisioning and data recovery; leading 4Gb performance and
support; tight integration with director, switch, and host bus
adapter (HBA) products from Brocade, Cisco, Emulex, McData, and
QLogic; SAN attach kits for host and OS support; and a
comprehensive interoperability matrix that provides support for all
major open systems computing platforms. More information and
technical details on NetApp FC SAN solutions are available at
www-uk.netapp.com/products/fcsan.html.
New and enhanced services announced today maximise the
advantages for customers to achieve data centre and other data
infrastructure advantages using NetApp. Designed with simplicity in
mind, NetApp Services leverage proven methodologies and best
practices to design and implement the right storage solution for
customers' unique data and business challenges. NetApp Services
synthesise specific storage expertise, knowledge, and experience
with regulatory requirements affecting data storage and the ability
to cost-reduce data infrastructures while optimising
performance-and augmenting customers' IT staff as needed-to ramp
production infrastructure quickly and reliably. The newly announced
Rapid Deployment Services for Storage Implementation help IT
departments reduce complexity, accelerate readiness, and realize
the benefits of their NetApp solutions quickly and efficiently.
Rapid Deployment Services enable customers to quickly and reliably
achieve production readiness on their newly purchased NetApp
systems in NAS and/or SAN environments. More information on NetApp
Services is available at
www.netapp.com/support/consultingedge.html.
Pricing and Availability
All products described in this press release are available
immediately from NetApp. Customer pricing is available from NetApp
sales or sales partners.
Technical Information
Technical information is available online for these and other
products. To receive ongoing technical updates and learn more, with
exclusive online member content, register for the NetApp Tech OnTap
program at
www.netapp-web.com/ontap/registration.aspx?ecode=20050917002232613&dcode=10055
.
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 solutions and services
is available at
www-uk.netapp.com.
NetApp is a registered trademark and Network Appliance, FlexShare,
RAID-DP, and Snapshot are trademarks 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.
For Further Information, please contact:
Elisabeth van de Mandele/Sally Robards
Kaizo
netapp@kaizo.net
020 7580 8852