NetApp Continues to Demonstrate Data Centre Leadership

New Midrange SAN Systems, Software, and Services Highlight Company’s Enterprise Strengths.
Network Appliance, Inc. (NASDAQ:NTAP) today extended its data centre portfolio with the addition of its new highest performing midrange platforms, the FAS3070 and V3070 series; broader Fibre Channel (FC) storage area network (SAN) capabilities; significant enhancements and introductions in the NetApp® Manageability Software Family; and new professional services, all aimed at making enterprise data centre management easier for customers who demand high-performance SAN solutions and increased application uptime to meet their business needs. Just a few short months after NetApp unveiled its high-end FAS6000 series and associated software and services, the company is again raising the bar for its competitors by offering the most flexibility, the highest availability, and the best value for its customers. More information on today’s news is available at http://www.netapp.com


“Today’s introductions highlight our comprehensive solutions for our customers’ data centres that offer the best performance for midrange SAN, enabling the most flexibility to adapt to business change, the highest availability of application data, and the highest productivity for IT administrators and assets,” said Patrick Rogers, vice president, Products and Partners at NetApp. “From the FAS3070 and V3070 to our extensive refresh of the NetApp Manageability Software Family, we have poured tremendous innovation into these products, making sure that they deliver the highest performance and application uptime at an attractive price. Whether a customer is looking for a powerful SAN for massive performance needs, a midrange SAN or NAS, or an archive, compliance, or backup solution, NetApp has that customer covered with a variety of solutions. EMC and HP should be concerned. We just have the better portfolio.”

“We are very concerned about the total cost of ownership of our entire IT infrastructure,” said George White, chief information officer with the Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General. “And when it comes to storage TCO, no one beats NetApp. Their products are easy to deploy and manage, they have a consistent architecture that runs through their entire product line from the biggest system to the smallest, and their software automates lots of tasks that would otherwise eat up precious staff time and resources.”

“I continue to be impressed with how well NetApp runs my database and collaborative applications,” said Michael S. Israel, senior vice president of Information Services at Six Flags, the world’s largest regional theme park company. “We have seen higher application uptime and greater performance from our NetApp systems than from previous systems that we deployed—and for smaller investments in capital, training, and service. NetApp understands my business needs—when they say they are ‘enterprise,’ they really get the concept.”

“NetApp truly understands that I need my IT resources, products and people, to be increasingly productive and flexible,” said Roman D’Alessio, Head of Unit IV/8/a , BM.I, Austrian Ministry of Interior. “I have been very impressed with my NetApp deployment and have seen marked improvements in our application availability since switching to the NetApp FAS systems. Plus, with Virtual File Manager™ we were able to build a global namespace to facilitate transparent data migration of hundreds of servers and provide simplified failover of remote servers to NetApp storage systems in the data centre.”

“Midrange storage is growing fast in the data centre across Australia and New Zealand because of its value and flexibility,” said Graham Penn, Associate VP, Storage, Asia Pacific, IDC. “Now NetApp raises the bar by enhancing the performance of its successful FAS3000 series with more value in the midrange and offering customers a very compelling data centre portfolio.”

Storage Systems

Paramount among today’s product introductions are the FAS3070 and V3070 storage systems. Both are aimed at the midrange and offer scalability to 252TB, superior application-level availability, and support for unified storage with both 4Gb FC SAN and 10GbE iSCSI, as well as industry-leading NAS functionality. The FAS3070 and V3070 are designed for customers who want high-end SAN performance and data management capabilities at a midrange price.

Competitively, the NetApp FAS3070 is aimed squarely at the EMC CLARiiON CX3-80, while far exceeding the scalability and capability of HP’s largest StorageWorks EVA system, the StorageWorks EVA8000. Benchmarks performed by Veritest, an independent testing lab, conclude that the FAS3070 delivers higher FC SAN performance for OLTP workloads than the EMC CX3-80. (Details are available in a separate release at http://www.netapp.com/news/press/news_rel_20061107a.) Unlike either the EVA8000 or the CX3-80, the FAS3070 offers low-overhead double parity RAID 6 (RAID-DP™); high-performance snapshots; thin provisioning; and the ability to support FC or IP SAN and NAS-based applications. The FAS3070 also supports an in-place, modular controller upgrade with no data migration, no retraining, and no process changes for customers who want eventually to move from the FAS3070 to the fully compatible high-end FAS6000 series. Both the EMC and HP systems require complete hardware and software replacement when upgrading to higher performing systems, as well as time- and labour-intensive data migration.

The FAS3070 is logically positioned between the FAS3050 and FAS6030 systems, providing customers with a range of choice points to meet specific needs for performance and scalability.

FC SAN Capabilities

On the FC SAN front, NetApp has enhanced multipath support and enhanced 4Gb SAN infrastructure support. The company has also certified and extended its SAN portfolio with more switches, including the Brocade SilkWorm 4900, the Brocade SilkWorm 48000 and new blades, the Cisco MDS 9513, and the QLogic 5600 and 5602. Repeated TCO studies performed by third parties demonstrate that NetApp continues to offers the industry’s lowest SAN TCO, and customer data has proved superior business application uptime using NetApp SAN solutions versus competitive offerings.

Software

NetApp continues to increase business value for its data centre customers with higher productivity and flexibility, thanks largely to the powerful software features and components in the NetApp Manageability Software Family. As part of the company’s business applications campaign kickoff, NetApp announced new versions of SnapManager® for Oracle and SnapManager for Exchange, which provide data protection and cloning for application environments. NetApp also released updated products for file management with a new version of its Virtual File Manager Enterprise Edition and unveiled a completely new Virtual File Manager Migration Edition to support file migration and file share consolidation.

· Information on SnapManager for Exchange is available at http://www.netapp.com/products/software/snapmanager-exchange.html.

· Information on SnapManager for Oracle is available at http://www.netapp.com/products/software/snapmanager-oracle.html.

· Information on Virtual File Manager is available at http://www.netapp.com/products/software/vfm.html.

· An overview of the entire NetApp Manageability Software Family is available at

http://www.netapp.com/products/software/management-software-family.html.

Patrick Rogers continued, “Today NetApp also kicked off its ‘business applications’ campaign, helping customers understand just how much value they can get out of their Oracle®, SQL, Microsoft® Exchange, and SAP applications through higher levels of integration with NetApp solutions. Integrating storage management capabilities into business applications at the application level is increasingly important for maximum performance and uptime. Others talk of the ‘data centre of tomorrow’—this kind of tight application integration is making tomorrow happen today.”

Also in the NetApp Manageability Software Family, NetApp introduced Protection Manager™, an automated backup and replication management tool for NetApp disk-to-disk environments. Protection Manager uses policy-based management to maximise data protection in data centres, remote offices, and disaster recover sites; to eliminate time-consuming manual mapping; and to help reduce the costs associated with manually managing secondary and tertiary storage resources. More information on Protection Manager is available at http://www.netapp.com/products/software/protection-manager.html.

Finally on the software front, NetApp unveiled NetApp CommandCentral™ Storage by Symantec, which integrates storage resource management (SRM), performance, and policy management and provisioning for high-end heterogeneous SAN environments. This reduces the number of tools that IT and storage administrators must rely on, helps those administrators gain complete visibility for tactical and strategic storage decisions, enables rapid provisioning of storage and SAN in mixed environments, and increases data availability with automated monitoring and alerts. Detailed information on CommandCentral Storage is available at http://www.netapp.com/products/software/commandcentral-storage.html.

Services

Professional services that were announced today, delivered by NetApp Global Services and their NetApp Global Services Partner Network, help customers accelerate design, deployment, migrations, and optimisation of their Exchange, SQL, and Oracle solutions. Expanding the existing professional services portfolio, these solutions help customers deploy the right storage solution to make the most of their business applications and to help them leverage years of NetApp “blueprinting” and expertise in those environments. With the new Exchange, Oracle, and SQL implementation services, customers can rapidly and cost effectively upgrade and migrate to new platforms, consolidate their data, and optimise their business continuity capabilities. NetApp Global Services partners are NetApp certified and are trained to design and implement solutions based on best practices. The new design and implementation services include:

· Exchange Implementation Services to help customers accelerate upgrades and migrations

· SQL Implementation Services to help customers optimise their SQL on NetApp solutions to maximise availability, performance, and scalability

· Oracle Implementation Services to help customers speed time to deployment for Oracle on NetApp solutions

Additionally, NetApp debuted the next generation of AutoSupport, the next step in their move toward automated and remote support services. AutoSupport provides proactive alerting to improve supportability and enhanced problem diagnostics, and makes system health and optimisation recommendations based on weekly logs. More information on these services is available at http://www.netapp.com/support/supportedge.html.

Pricing and Availability

All customer pricing for products described in this press release 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 to learn more, with exclusive online member content, register for the NetApp Tech OnTap program at www.netapp-web.com

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.netapp.com.