Data ONTAP 7G delivers these benefits by pooling storage resources with built-in logic that automatically manages fine-grained data, and enables administrators to shrink or expand volumes to accommodate storage demand changes on the fly. Whereas other solutions on the market require heavy administrator intervention to allocate storage and are static in nature, Data ONTAP 7G automatically handles allocations and utilization and can absorb additional storage resources dynamically with no human intervention. The net effects are lower storage management costs and significant time savings as storage is intelligently configured and reconfigured non-disruptively, even during production hours.

Data ONTAP 7G also makes data cloning for test, development, and simulation instantaneous and "storage frugal", further helping with storage utilization and providing significant benefits for customers and applications that require lots of intensive data modeling and manipulation.

"Data ONTAP 7G simplifies data management, and delivers what our customers are asking for-a flexible storage infrastructure that offers high performance, massive and rapid scalability, and minimal management overhead-all to achieve maximum value from enterprise data," said Paul Albright, senior vice president of Marketing at Network Appliance. "It is also the first storage software to provide dynamic virtualization, a real breakthrough and industry achievement in not only virtualization but also in laying the groundwork for the world's most powerful Storage Grid architecture."

"Data ONTAP 7G delivers exceptional business value to help today's enterprise liberate its data for more robust, high-performance applications in workgroups, departments, and data centers," said Steve Duplessie at Enterprise Strategy Group. "Whether an enterprise is looking at a traditional storage approach or a Storage Grid, the latest storage software from NetApp offers compelling benefits."

Plus in order to accelerate customer readiness, improve asset utilization, and more efficiently take advantage of the powerful new features in Data ONTAP 7G, NetApp Global Services is launching the immediate availability of ConsultingEdge Data Migration Services for Data ONTAP 7G. By combining exceptional storage expertise and applying best practices, NetApp Global Services assists customers in making a smooth transition to Data ONTAP 7G.

Data ONTAP 7G Features
The primary new features of Data ONTAP 7G that bring compelling user benefits to life are FlexVol™ and FlexClone™ features.

FlexVol is a compelling new feature of Data ONTAP 7G that creates dynamically virtualized, flexible data containers that eliminate performance and utilization tradeoffs and renders obsolete the notion of storage volumes being statically tied to specific physical or logical disks. In short, FlexVol is the feature of Data ONTAP 7G that provides dynamic virtualization. FlexVol enables the precision tailoring of NetApp advanced data management features, such as Snapshot™ point-in-time data imaging and SnapMirror^® replication facilities, to the unique needs of each application data set, while also providing the performance of large disk pools to even the smallest data sets. FlexVol also allows for the dynamic and non-disruptive provisioning (growing and/or shrinking) of storage volumes and facilitates a utility storage model based on thin provisioning of capacity.

FlexVol is complemented by RAID-DP™, an earlier NetApp innovation, making large pools of disk drives practical and safeguarding against multidisk failure scenarios, an increasing vulnerability given the large capacities of today's drives.

"Competitive approaches to a solution such as FlexVol are manual, complex, rigid, and disruptive to IT processes and end users," said Albright. "FlexVol represents a giant leap forward in file system and storage virtualization technology."

FlexClone enables the near-instantaneous creation of multiple, independently writable images of FlexVol data sets, with zero storage overhead. Cloned data can be manipulated and tested in a variety of ways without affecting the initial data set; only changes in the clone consume additional storage space. Competitive approaches for cloning data take up the same amount of storage space as the full original data set. FlexClone represents a breakthrough innovation for database applications and modeling.

"Application test and development environments have to deal with inordinate complexity and storage overhead to manage multiple cloned copies," continued Albright. "FlexClone technology is revolutionary in the simplicity it delivers, as well as the enormous cost savings that can be realized from its space efficiency relative to competing solutions."

As Albright concluded, "The new FlexVol and FlexClone capabilities in Data ONTAP 7G improve storage utilization, increase data application performance, streamline data center operations, enable powerful new application modeling and testing possibilities, free IT personnel for other projects, and ultimately save money. Our new software firmly establishes the NetApp innovation lead in enterprise storage."

Pricing and Availability
Data ONTAP 7G is available immediately on all NetApp storage systems. Pricing information is available from NetApp sales and NetApp distribution partners upon request.

Conference Call Information
Network Appliance will hold a conference call to discuss details of today's announcement. The conference call will be broadcast live via the Internet at http://investors.netapp.com on Monday, November 15, 2004 at 8:00 a.m. Pacific Time. This press release and any other information related to the call will also be posted to the Web at www.netapp.com. The conference call will also be available live in a listen-only format at 800-329-9097 in the United States and 617-614-4929 outside the United States. The passcode for both numbers is 50681530.

A replay of the call will be available for 72 hours following completion of the live call by dialing 888-286-8010 in the United States and 617-801-6888 outside the United States. The replay passcode for both numbers is 42244268.

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.

Data ONTAP 7G Customer and Partner Quote Addendum

Customer Quotes
Ken Tsai, IT Architect, Cobalt Group, Seattle, Washington
"Cobalt is very excited about the new capabilities of Data ONTAP 7G, which will give us maximum usage of our data and storage resources, "said, Ken Tsai, IT Architect at the Cobalt Group.

Dan Greller, Chief Technology Officer Legg Mason Wood Walker, Inc.
"Legg Mason Wood Walker Inc. is focused on delivering consistent and reliable data storage management across our tier-one enterprise operations. Key trends and business requirements like corporate governance and compliance are driving the need for a better approach to storage management that helps financial services firms create a virtualized storage environment that better allocates resources for running mission-critical data warehousing and traditional OLTP applications. Functionality in Data ONTAP 7G like FlexVol and FlexClone will make provisioning of storage resources much faster and more flexible so we can maximize our IT investments and successfully scale the business."

Jerome Labat, vice president of Operations and Infrastructure for Oracle E-Business Suite Development
"Oracle, like its customers, requires a low-cost, easy-to-use, and easy-to-provision storage infrastructure," said Jerome Labat, vice president of Operations and Infrastructure for Oracle E-Business Suite Development. "We helped specify the FlexVol and FlexClone features of Data ONTAP 7G, and we plan to use them in our operations to drive cost efficiencies through improved developer productivity and storage utilization."

Paul Santinelli, director of IT at Red Hat
"Red Hat is a satisfied NetApp customer, and has been for the past five years. We entrust our mission-critical tools - including Red Hat Network running on Oracle and our Oracle E-Business Suite implementation - on NetApp unified storage systems. Our experience as a NetApp customer validates the complementary nature of both companies' technologies. Red Hat is enthusiastic to include the capabilities of NetApp Data ONTAP 7G with our IT business application infrastructure. This solution helps Red Hat serve our customers better."

Armin Balkie, Senior IT-System Architect, T-Systems
"Data ONTAP 7G represents high performance, streamlined operations, and intelligent automation. As a service provider, we benefit from the new, instant cloning and testing capabilities for databases, an even simpler administration, and the extremely high flexibility of the file service to better serve our customers and easily meet SLAs. Data ONTAP 7G is a giant step forward in the NetApp storage grid vision. We are excited about the variety of new possibilities within a NetApp environment."

Prof. Dr. Klaus Merle Head of Computing Center, Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, Germany
"Data ONTAP 7G incorporates intelligence and automation that make storage resources self-optimizing, self-protecting, and self-healing. These benefits are a boon to today's data-driven enterprise and simplify data management, ultimately saving money and IT resources for other business requirements. I think we'll see a large interest in this latest software from NetApp and that customers will embrace FlexVol and FlexClone with open arms."

Partner Quotes
Atempo
"Storage Grids are the natural complement to compute grids and Linux farms that are coming to dominate large sectors of the high-performance and data-intensive computing space. Network Appliance pioneered the Storage Grid concept in autumn of last year and Data ONTAP 7G firmly establishes NetApp leadership in the Storage Grid space. Atempo is uniquely positioned with Time Navigator to provide a comprehensive data protection solution for data contained in the Storage Grid," said Francois Gauthier, chief technology officer for Atempo.

AXS-One Inc.
"The Storage Grid architecture will enable tighter application integration with database and enterprise applications, provide superior scalability, have the ability to more easily manage data resources based on policies, and provide improved data security," said Peter Mojica, vice president of Product Management, AXS-One Inc. "NetApp Data ONTAP 7G is the ideal Storage Grid operating environment."

BakBone Software, Inc.
"Storage Grid architectures promise to simplify the management of storage resources and require a new approach to protecting enterprise data assets. The combination of BakBone's NetVault and NetApp Data ONTAP 7G provides customers with an adaptive storage infrastructure that delivers high performance, rapid scalability, and simplified data management of complex data resources," said Adrian Jones, senior vice president, Worldwide OEM & Alliance Group at BakBone Software, Inc.

Brocade Communications Systems, Inc.
"NetApp has set a new threshold of performance and capability for enterprise storage and grid environments with Data ONTAP 7G. We are excited about partnering with NetApp to maximize the performance of their systems with the Brocade family of SilkWorm switches and directors," said Tom Buiocchi, vice president Worldwide Marketing Brocade Communications Systems Inc.

Computer Associates International, Inc.
"Today's information-centric enterprises need to view the massive amount of data their applications are generating as a strategic business advantage - not as a burdensome IT 'housekeeping' challenge," said Anders Lofgren, vice president of BrightStor storage management at CA. "CA is working closely with NetApp to ensure that users of our BrightStor intelligent storage management solutions can take full advantage of Data ONTAP 7G technology to effectively exploit their enterprise data."

Cisco
"NetApp Data ONTAP 7G extends the NetApp and Cisco vision for storage consolidation, scalability, quality of service and simplified management. Cisco and NetApp are currently in the process of qualifying interoperability of the Cisco MDS 9000 series of intelligent SAN switches with NetApp Data ONTAP 7G and believe that the combination of Cisco and NetApp products will offer customers unique solutions that address their data center needs," said Craig Griffin, senior director for Cisco's storage business unit.

CommVault
"As a NetApp partner, we are excited about the speed and capabilities of Data ONTAP 7G," said Dave West, vice president of Business Development, CommVault. "The Data ONTAP 7G solutions, like SnapLock for compliance and SnapVault, dovetail perfectly with our QiNetix unified data management solution. QiNetix truly integrates backup, replication, HSM, archiving and SRM to fully leverage high-powered storage devices, like Data ONTAP 7G, in a tiered storage environment. With this combination, customers can maximize data protection and availability at the lowest possible cost."

CreekPath
"We are seeing strong demand for scalable and extensible storage architectures in customer environments," said Scott Hansbury, senior vice president of Marketing, CreekPath. "As a NetApp strategic partner, CreekPath can take advantage of Data ONTAP 7G to provide customers with a solution that supports scalable, interoperable storage solutions to drive tangible business value."

Datalink
"There are a number of new features in Data ONTAP 7G that have a dramatic impact on the management, performance, and efficiency of NetApp-based consolidated storage environments. In particular, we think that FlexVol functionality will be quickly embraced by customers as a way to simplify management and drive improved capacity utilization," said Scott Robinson, chief technology officer at Datalink. "Using this data-centric approach to storage pooling helps NetApp environments deliver the promise of storage virtualization."

Fujitsu Siemens Computer Systems
"NetApp is continuing to deliver on its Storage Grid vision with the launch of Data ONTAP 7G. The new version of the operating system features tremendous virtualization capabilities leading the way to flexible and cost conscious enterprise data management," said Dr. Helmut Beck, Vice President Storage at Fujitsu Siemens Computer Systems. "Data ONTAP 7G offers a flexibility that complements our FlexFrame architecture for a demand driven infrastructure. We are confident that our customers will recognize the benefits immediately."

FileNet
"We believe NetApp has set a new threshold of capability and flexibility for content storage and regulatory compliance with Data ONTAP 7G. We are excited about partnering with NetApp not only to help maximize the performance and minimize operational costs of our joint solution using FileNet's P8 software with NetApp unified storage offerings, but also for a versatile solution enabling regulatory compliance with FileNet Records Manager and NetApp SnapLock for enhanced data retention and protection," said Dan Whelan, chief technology officer at FileNet.

GlassHouse Technologies
"Our clients are focused on improving manageability and reducing risk in their enterprise storage environments, which rely on high-performance applications and the ability to provision storage efficiently and cost effectively," said Richard Scannell, senior vice president for North American consulting at GlassHouse Technologies. "Software such as Data ONTAP 7G has the potential to simplify data management while providing architectural flexibility to meet the future needs of enterprise storage users."

ILumin
"Data ONTAP 7G represents tremendous value to iLumin's customers who are storing greater amounts of message archive data for longer periods of time than ever before. Email management solutions require future-proof scalability and NetApp has created that framework for our customers," said Mike Gundling, iLumin vice president of Product Management.

McDATA
"Data ONTAP 7G represents a huge leap forward in enterprise storage software. The innovations in Data ONTAP 7G such as FlexVol and FlexClone simplify the process of storage provisioning and deliver dramatic improvements in utilization. McDATA has leveraged these innovations in it's SANavigator management platform to provide comprehensive, yet simplified management of NetApp storage in a combined IP and Fibre Channel storage area network," said Jonathan Buckley, vice president of software platforms, McDATA.

Novell Inc.
"NetApp Data ONTAP 7G is an ideal storage platform for large Novell SUSE LINUX-based compute farms," says Chris Schlaeger, vice president of Research and Development at Novell Inc. "Using Novell SUSE LINUX together with Data ONTAP 7G, our customers with their most demanding compute intensive environments can experience even greater performance, more flexibility, with much simplified data management of complex data resources. The effective provisioning and management of 1000s of scalable compute and storage building blocks is enabled by the power of SUSE LINUX, Novell's identity management eDirectory suite, and NetApp Data ONTAP 7G. New previously unsolvable compute problems in the fields of life sciences, financial services, energy exploration and computer animation are being solved with the help of grid computing and products from Novell and NetApp."

NuView, Inc.
"NetApp Data ONTAP 7G is the ideal enterprise storage platform to power a variety of tier one, secondary, and even Storage Grid applications. Using Virtual File Manager (VFM) with Data ONTAP 7G, customers can experience greater performance, more flexibility, and simplified data management of complex data resources," said Rahul Mehta, chief executive officer of NuView, Inc.

"The latest version of NetApp Data ONTAP allows storage to be pooled and managed as a pool in a data-centric-not disk-centric-approach without regard for physical disk locations or configurations. Together with VFM, customers can experience virtualization of a kind no one else in the industry is providing, and represents a real benefit to data-hungry enterprises that need to simplify their data management and maximize overall disk subsystem performance."

OpenText
"For our customers, the link between our ECM solutions and their storage infrastructure is critical. We see NetApp Data ONTAP 7G as a very powerful enterprise storage platform, which we support through our Enterprise Content Repository," said Mike Baraiolo, vice president of Global Business Development at Open Text. "By combining our solutions with Data ONTAP 7G, customers can manage large volumes of data more easily and experience greater performance, more flexibility, and simplified management of complex data resources."

Princeton Softech
"Princeton Softech's leading database archiving technology and a flexible, manageable and cost-efficient storage infrastructure are essential to implementing an enterprise Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) strategy," said Paul Winn, president and CEO, Princeton Softech. "NetApp storage solutions, equipped with the new Data ONTAP 7G software, and Princeton Softech's Active Archive Solutions, enable our mutual customers to better manage the lifecycle of their most business-critical data - their enterprise application data."

PTC Systems Pte Ltd.
"FlexClone is an intelligent, simple tool for duplicating data without having to pay a penalty on capacity," said Benjamin Leong, senior technical consultant at PTC Systems Pte Ltd. "For the first time our customers have a more efficient and dependable way of Database testing and for developing production data. They now have the ability to clone, test, destroy, and replicate the cloning process in a matter of minutes, saving money, time, and manpower. FlexClone is a breakthrough storage solution that we expect to greatly improve how our customers' handle data."

Sybase
"Managing the enterprise data explosion is becoming one of the most important challenges facing successful organizations in today's business environment," said Sumit Kundu, director of engineering at Sybase, Inc. "Solutions created using NetApp Data ONTAP 7G and Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) and other Sybase information management products, will provide customers with more automated storage management capabilities in a Storage Grid environment, leading to greater scalability, higher performance and reduced cost of operations."

Syncsort, Inc.
"The NetApp Data ONTAP 7G Storage Grid architecture will provide superior data protection and security. Combining Data ONTAP 7G with Syncsort's Backup Express allows customers to protect critical data and maintain business continuity with a new threshold of capability. With Data ONTAP 7G, customers can achieve instant recovery-point objectives and implement even more comprehensive disaster recovery, all while simplifying the management of ever-growing extensive data and resources," Dan Regan, executive vice president, Syncsort, Inc.

VERITAS/KVS
"VERITAS and NetApp continue to work together to offer innovative data and storage management solutions to meet our customers' evolving business requirements. Specifically, through our KVS business unit, we are working with NetApp to help customers cope with growing compliance and regulatory requirements and ever expanding volumes of e-mail and documents by delivering solutions that allow them to transparently archive data and quickly retrieve specific information as needed," said Sanjay Poonen, vice president of strategic alliances, VERITAS Software. "VERITAS products such as VERITAS NetBackup™ and VERITAS Enterprise Vault™ software leverage key elements of Data ONTAP 7G to offer our mutual customers powerful solutions to address these important issues."

Press Contacts:
Eric Brown
Network Appliance, Inc.
408-822-3463
ebrown@netapp.com

Jaime Leigh Le
Network Appliance, Inc.
408-822-3761
jle@netapp.com