NetApp Challenges Largest Storage Competitors for Data Center Leadership; Best Total Cost of Ownership and Highest Productivity Set New Storage Solutions Apart From the Rest

Business Wire, May 8, 2006

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Network Appliance, Inc. (NASDAQ:NTAP) today announced a new line of products and services designed to enhance customers' data management capabilities and to unseat EMC and HP for leadership of open systems storage in the enterprise data center. The expanded NetApp(R) portfolio offers modular, transparent scalability for the largest data center applications and consolidations; maximum flexibility to help customers adapt to business changes; and the highest availability of application data, ultimately enabling more productivity for IT administrators and achieving the best overall total cost of ownership. These offerings are aimed at enterprises that have vast data requirements and demanding service-level agreements and that operate large-scale Oracle(R), SAP, and Microsoft(R) enterprise applications. Unlike competitive frame array products, the NetApp approach to storage simplifies storage provisioning, improves utilization of storage assets, and increases IT productivity, hence delivering dramatically better business value. Additional details are available online at www.netapp.com/go/datacenterproven/pr/.> Two new systems announced today include the FAS6030 and the FAS6070, new flagship systems that greatly extend the breadth and scale of the NetApp storage systems portfolio. An enhanced NetApp Manageability Software family and new Fibre Channel (FC) SAN capabilities also debuted today. In addition, two new services were announced: Premium Support Services for the FAS6070 and Rapid Deployment Services for Storage Implementation. Highlighting its greater value in data center environments, NetApp also unveiled a Mercer study for data storage total cost comparison (www.netapp.com/go/sap/2006/) showing that in real-world settings with equivalent availability and performance service levels, competitive solutions are between 55% and 260% more expensive to own than NetApp solutions.

Martin Cooper, chief technology officer at Arup, a world-renowned engineering consultancy, agreed. "NetApp has clearly taken a different and better approach to solve my data center challenges. From robust, flexible, and modular hardware to an intelligent and automated software manageability framework, NetApp has consistently proven it understands that I need minimum complexity and maximum performance and that data availability is central to my business' success."

Noel Levasseur, Executive Vice President at First American Bank, a full-service bank with over 41 Chicago area locations and more than $2 billion in assets continued, "NetApp storage solutions enable us to provision and reconfigure our storage quickly giving us the flexibility to adapt to our business needs. NetApp has taken a better approach than previous suppliers. Due to complex configuration and management we always ran out of storage space and never really utilized the capacity within our SAN. Now with the NetApp solution, we are able to increase our storage utilization."

"The world's largest and most demanding businesses use NetApp solutions to simplify their complex enterprise application and data infrastructures. They have realized the advantages NetApp offers from core production to test and development to departmental and remote office," said Dan Warmenhoven, CEO of Network Appliance. "Customers no longer have to purchase large, complex and expensive frame arrays to support their enterprise data management needs. Our new FAS6000 series, new and enhanced integrated management software, industry-leading FC SAN infrastructure solutions, and robust set of new and enhanced services and support offerings position NetApp as a clear leader to help IT organizations achieve even greater returns and maximize their resources. We offer the most scalable, cost-effective, high-performance solutions available bar none. Market and customer analysis shows that we are growing three times faster than the industry average in enterprise application data centers and we have seen greater than 90% growth year over year in Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft environments. We are growing at 125% in FC SAN and we offer up to 40% cost of ownership savings versus others in the data center and high-end SAN space. NetApp is clearly the data management solution of choice for the enterprise data center."

"Data center complexity has gone through the roof due to the explosion of data, infrastructure consolidation, mounting security concerns, as well as compliance and regulatory needs," said Brad Nisbet, Program Manager with IDC. "It is abundantly clear that enterprise data centers are in need of proven solutions that can simplify management, increase productivity, and give them the flexibility to adapt to changing business needs."

New Products and Services

The NetApp FAS6000 is the highest-end NetApp system, extending the NetApp FAS line to a substantially higher level of performance and scalability. The FAS6000 is designed to help customers reduce the TCO of large-scale storage for business applications. With NetApp Premium Support Services, customers can enjoy always-on availability to meet expected and even increased service levels. The systems scale to 500TB of capacity, a level previously available only with the most expensive storage systems. Unlike competitive high-end storage systems such as the EMC Symmetrix, the FAS6000 has a modular storage design, making it easier to deploy "as needed" to increase business agility and reduce costs.