Network Appliance Unveils New Heterogeneous Data Protection and Storage Consolidation Solutions; NetApp Enhances Its Unified Storage Portfolio

Business Wire, Feb 18, 2003

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 18, 2003

Network Appliance (Nasdaq:NTAP) today announced several new hardware and software products that extend the company's lead in delivering heterogeneous data protection and storage consolidation solutions. Medium and large businesses are now able to better protect their valuable data, maintain uptime, and dramatically lower time-to-recovery with maximum flexibility, performance, and simplicity by adding NetApp(R) solutions such as the NearStore(TM) R150, SnapVault(TM), MetroCluster, and a certified NearStore and VERITAS(R) Volume Replicator offering. These solutions from Network Appliance demonstrate the company's leadership in disk-based backup/restore solutions designed to maintain business continuance and prepare for disaster recovery.

Concurrently, Network Appliance also unveiled the industry's first server-side implementation of NFS Version 4, software that enables enterprises to consolidate their current storage to a more robust and secure solution. In addition, it launched an enhanced version of Virtual File Manager(TM) -- VFM(TM) 3.0, the industry's first file-level storage virtualization solution, which provides nondisruptive heterogeneous storage migration.

"Customers have always turned to NetApp solutions to help them achieve greater storage performance, flexibility, and simplicity," said Mark Santora, senior vice president of marketing at Network Appliance. "With today's new solutions, Network Appliance continues to change the traditional backup/restore and replication paradigm. Customers can now deploy NetApp even more broadly for advanced data protection critical to business success, bringing peace of mind and security to a significant IT challenge."

Solution Details

Data Protection

In today's competitive economy, access to data is a critical success factor, and storage is the key component to ensuring fast, reliable data access. With the new solutions announced today, Network Appliance extends its disk-based backup/recovery portfolio with important enhancements that:

-- Improve restore performance, achieving near-instantaneous recovery from data failure, helping businesses remain up and running 24x7

-- Lower the infrastructure and downtime costs associated with traditional backup and recovery options by eliminating costly planned backup windows, speeding up restores, significantly reducing network bandwidth demands, and greatly simplifying administration and data recovery

-- Extend the benefits of NetApp backup and recovery solutions to heterogeneous storage deployments, enabling customers to maximize the returns on legacy storage investments

-- Bring the robust security features of NFS V4 to data centers, helping corporations achieve a comprehensive data integrity and security strategy

Storage Consolidation

With the rapid proliferation of data, reducing the complexity associated with managing distributed servers and a dispersed user base is a key IT imperative. Today's solutions also extend the NetApp storage consolidation portfolio with enhancements designed to:

-- Eliminate downtime and operational complexity associated with

consolidating servers and associated storage

-- Reduce management complexity and operational support issues

associated with distributed and regional data servers

-- Greatly enhance security associated with distributed storage

environments

Product Details

NearStore R150 is the latest addition to the NearStore family, the industry's first hard disk backup/recovery and nearline storage solution. Launched nearly one year ago, with more than three petabytes in production use at customer sites, NearStore has become the industry's de facto standard for enterprise nearline storage. The second-generation NearStore R150 doubles capacity to 24TB per module and provides twice the backup throughput (up to 430GB per hour) -- all at only one cent ($US0.01) per megabyte.

The newest version of SnapVault software strengthens the NetApp offering for disk-to-disk backup solutions by leveraging open NDMP APIs to support backups from a variety of NetApp and non-NetApp storage solutions. Working closely with leading backup partners such as Atempo, BakBone, CommVault, Computer Associates, LEGATO systems, Reliaty, Syncsort, and VERITAS, to broaden the reach of SnapVault in heterogeneous storage environments, Network Appliance delivers unprecedented ease of backup to solve a complex enterprise challenge. SnapVault helps customers consolidate their backup infrastructures for greater management ease and flexibility, and provides a more robust backup/restore and replication solution by shrinking the backup window and dramatically lowering the time-to-recovery. Additional details on SnapVault and NetApp solution partners are available in a separate press release issued today.

MetroCluster is a powerful, automated high availability and business continuance solution that provides fast site failover capability to remote data centers with minimal operator intervention. It is the first NetApp software offering to provide synchronous replication over campus/metro distances. In the event of any outage -- whether due to an isolated hardware or software problem or an overall site disaster -- MetroCluster extends the benefits of clustered storage system technology to sites located several miles apart. MetroCluster instantly accesses replicated data on a remote storage system with minimal intervention or disruption to client applications, and ensures that mirror data at a remote site is always current and ready to use after failover.