Network Appliance Positioned in Leaders Quadrant in Midrange Enterprise Disk Arrays Magic Quadrant

Business Wire, Dec 18, 2006

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Network Appliance, Inc. (NASDAQ:NTAP) today announced that it has been positioned by Gartner, Inc. in the "Leaders" quadrant for midrange enterprise disk arrays. In its newly released research note, "Magic Quadrant for Midrange Enterprise Disk Array, 2H06,"1 Gartner states, "A midrange enterprise disk array storage vendor in the Leaders Quadrant has the market share, credibility, and marketing and sales capabilities needed to drive the acceptance of new technologies. It demonstrates understanding of market needs, is an innovator and thought leader, and has well-articulated plans that customers and prospects can use in designing their storage infrastructure and strategies."

"Network Appliance believes that technology leaders have the responsibility to continually drive business value through applied innovation," said Tom Georgens, executive vice president and general manager of Enterprise Storage Systems at Network Appliance. "Where some vendors see 'markets,' we see thousands of individual organizations -- each with its own set of unique business challenges -- struggling to efficiently manage the vast amounts of data in their growing enterprise environments. Our high-performance SAN solutions were specifically developed to transform technology into a competitive advantage by increasing reliability, simplifying maintenance, and reducing storage infrastructure complexity."

The world's largest and most demanding businesses use NetApp[R] Fibre Channel (FC) SAN solutions to simplify their complex enterprise application and data infrastructures. By coupling high-performance storage with unique data management software, NetApp delivers increased availability of critical data and applications, simplification of complex data management environments, and significant productivity improvements in application administration, resulting in lower storage costs. In addition, NetApp FAS systems support file services, FC SAN, IP SAN, and multiple network configurations, while offering scalability to higher performance systems with seamless, painless upgrades without requiring "forklift" data migration. With the introduction of the NetApp FAS6000 series, NetApp increased the performance and physical scalability of its largest FAS systems for data center environments designed for the largest enterprise applications as well as demanding technical applications. NetApp customers have realized that they no longer have to purchase large, complex, and expensive frame arrays to support their enterprise data management needs.

The Gartner research note is available from Gartner at www.gartner.com. The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted December 2006 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product, or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the Leaders quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

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 to simplify data management. Information about Network Appliance[TM] solutions and services is available at www.netapp.com.

1 Magic Quadrant for Midrange Enterprise Disk Arrays, 2H06, by Stanley Zaffos, April Adams and Roger W. Cox, November 2006.

NetApp is a registered trademark and Network Appliance is a trademark 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.