NetApp Ushers in Next Wave of Data Center Transformation

Business Wire, Feb 12, 2008

New SnapManager for Virtual Infrastructure, SnapManager Compatibility With VMware Virtualization Software, and Professional Services Capitalize on Benefits of Virtualization

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- NetApp (NASDAQ:NTAP) today announced new products and capabilities as part of the NetApp[R] Manageability Software Family to enable customers to transform their data center architectures. Today's announcement is driven by NetApp storage innovations for virtualized servers that will help customers improve their IT infrastructure and processes. Enterprise customers are undergoing significant data center transformations to enhance IT flexibility and efficiency as server virtualization moves into broader deployment. To enable this transformation, NetApp is providing customers a proven storage platform for virtualized environments to achieve increased service levels, higher asset utilization, and greater data center power, space, and cooling efficiencies.

"NetApp will be a major catalyst in enabling customers to capitalize on the next generation of data center infrastructure," said Jay Kidd, chief marketing officer at NetApp. "Today we have established a lead in delivering virtualization solutions and services that help customers transform their current IT architectures and amplify the impact that IT operations have on their business. Combining VMware's full data center virtualization solutions with NetApp's networked storage solutions is dramatically improving data management and providing customers a path to creating a transparent infrastructure."

"Our research indicates that IT departments are continually challenged to do more with less, making it increasingly difficult to manage infrastructure complexity while at the same time meet service level agreements and increase staff productivity," said Roger Cox, Research VP, Gartner. "Customers are looking for an architectural approach that will deliver near instant response to business unit requests, automate the most labor intensive tasks, and scale infrastructure transparently over time."

Today's news further strengthens NetApp's unified data management platform with the following new innovative software solutions to drive customers' data center transformation:

* SnapManager[R] for Virtual Infrastructure -- SnapManager for Virtual Infrastructure enables customers to protect their VMware environments with automated data protection and recovery of their virtual machines. SnapManager for Virtual Infrastructure dramatically reduces human error and increases server utilization for application workloads by eliminating the interruptions and performance impact caused by traditional server-hosted backups and restores. As a result, customers can protect their data more reliably. More information is available at www.netapp.com/products/enterprise-software/manageability-soft ware/server-suite/smgr-virtual-infrastructure.html.

* SnapManager Compatibility with VMware Virtualization Software -- All Windows-based SnapManager products are now compatible with VMware virtualization software, providing customers the ability to manage data within virtual machines and take full advantage of the application-specific data management capabilities provided by NetApp's SnapManager products. Versions are available for Exchange, SQL, SharePoint, and Oracle. By extending SnapManager capabilities to virtual infrastructures, customers now have common data management tools for both their virtualized and physical server environments. These innovative products will also help accelerate deployment of existing Windows applications into new virtual server environments.

* Provisioning Manager -- Provisioning Manager provides policy-based automation to speed up existing provisioning processes, improve capacity utilization, and reduce human error that results in data loss. As a result, storage administrators can eliminate the complex series of manual steps normally associated with provisioning storage in both virtual and physical server environments. This simplifies training for IT staff and liberates these valuable personnel to work on more strategic IT priorities. For more details, visit http://www.netapp.com/products/enterprise-software/manageabili ty-software/data-suite/provisioning.html.

"Virtualization is helping thousands of enterprises reduce complexity and improve management of their data centers," said Parag Patel, vice president, alliances at VMware. "NetApp's new SnapManager for Virtual Infrastructure leverages VMware virtualization for improved management and automation, including virtual machine backup, restoration, replication, and disaster recovery. Together, VMware and NetApp are helping customers transform their IT infrastructures and increase productivity to better respond to their changing business needs."

"VMware and NetApp give us the best of both worlds, running virtual applications and storing the images of virtual machines on NetApp hardware," said Ed Grassie, director of Technology and Infrastructure with BBM Canada, which provides broadcast measurement and consumer behavior data to Canadian broadcasters, advertisers, and agencies. "NetApp solutions supply the data storage power while VMware virtualization software enables us to distribute data and processing the way that we want. NetApp enables us to protect our data with immediate mirroring to remote systems to support disaster recovery. This provides extra time so we can either deliver the data earlier to customers or recover from other issues or problems along the way."