Forrester Research's TEI™ Study Finds the NetApp® SnapVault Backup and Recovery Solution Delivers Positive Economic Impact to Customers

Sunnyvale, Calif. - January 19, 2004 -- Network Appliance Inc. (NASDAQ: NTAP), a leading provider of enterprise network storage solutions, today announced the findings of Forrester Research, Inc.'s Total Economic Impact (TEI) study of the Network Appliance™ SnapVault Backup and Recovery Solution. Forrester's data was obtained directly from current NetApp customers to analyze cost, benefits, flexibility, and risk metrics that reflected the economic impact of each customer's business environment. The findings indicate that NetApp enterprise customers using SnapVault in conjunction with NetApp NearStore® R200 nearline storage systems will have a positive impact on the ability to consistently maintain high levels of data availability and reliability and reduce the overall customer operational cost.

Key findings included in the Forrester Research study:
  • Network Appliance SnapVault backup and recovery solution can result in an 89% TEI return on investment (ROI) in a 19-month payback period
  • Total three-year IT cost savings and flexibility benefits were, on average, $2,487,369
  • Total three-year net savings were $1,169,119

Customers also concluded that the NetApp SnapVault backup and recovery solution:

  • Simplifies and increases the reliability of data backup and recovery
  • Significantly reduces the time-to-recover data versus recovery from traditional tape restores
  • Performs incremental forever backups to use CPU, network, and storage resources more efficiently
  • Improves the availability of data
  • Provides automated operation to lower the cost of backup administration

"The NetApp SnapVault backup and recovery solution enables important data to be highly protected and easily restored," said Mike Marchi, senior director of marketing, ILM, compliance and data protection solutions at Network Appliance. "Historically, enterprise data backup and recovery has been a time-intensive, expensive, and sometimes unreliable process. This TEI study validates that NetApp SnapVault conquers these customer challenges by offering a fully integrated backup and restore solution with heightened management and simplicity, and reduced overhead."

For more information on the report, please refer to: http://www.netapp.com/tech_library/ftp/analyst/ar1021.pdf

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 that continue to drive "The evolution of storage™." Information about Network Appliance solutions and services is available at www.netapp.com.

Press Contact:
Jaime Leigh Le
Network Appliance, Inc.
408.822.3761
jle@netapp.com