Customers Help NetApp Outpace SAN Industry Market Growth With 15,000 Production Deployments

NetApp (NASDAQ:NTAP) today announced that its customers have fueled a significant company milestone with 15,000 production deployments of NetApp® SAN (storage area network) solutions. Customer adoption of NetApp in the data center has made the company one of the storage industry’s fastest growing enterprise SAN solution providers, outpacing FC market growth and extending its market leadership in IP SAN solutions. According to IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker, Q3 2007, NetApp outpaced the FC SAN market growth both sequentially and year-over-year in terms of revenue and capacity, increasing FC SAN revenue at more than four times the rate of the overall FC SAN market and capacity at twice the rate of the overall market. IDC’s Tracker also shows that NetApp continues to lead the NAS and iSCSI storage markets in Q307, maintaining the number-one market share positions in capacity shipped for NAS (38.7%) and in iSCSI for both capacity shipped (28.3%) and revenue (20.5%). "NetApp continues to demonstrate strong market growth in enterprise SAN solutions for the data center,” said Brad Nisbet, program manager, Storage Systems, IDC. "Enterprise customers require a compelling value proposition of improved data management and simplicity. Based on market adoption, NetApp seems to be effectively meeting this customer need.” NetApp SAN growth is being driven by its solutions, which deliver the industry’s best cost of ownership, superior business application uptime, and the easiest and most efficient provisioning and management. Global customers are realizing significant benefits in the most demanding performance environments, including increased availability of critical data, simplification of complex data management environments, improved productivity, and higher utilization of assets, all at a lower storage cost than competitive solutions. In addition, the NetApp unified storage approach provides maximum flexibility and investment protection with multiprotocol storage, which enables simultaneous access to multiple block (FC, iSCSI) and file (NFS, CIFS) protocols, from the same storage system. "We chose a NetApp SAN solution because it allows us to host Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and NFS on a single platform, with a common set of data management tools,” said Dan Hedstrom, director of IT, Global Infrastructure, Newport Corporation, a globally recognized leader in advanced technology products and solutions based in Irvine, California. "This capability has allowed us to consolidate multiple SAN-based applications on one NetApp solution, which saved us both time and money.” "For a large media group like ours, we were looking for a solution that would help us scale seamlessly while guaranteeing the highest availability. The NetApp SAN solution came closest to our expectations,” said Debashish Ghosh, deputy director, Response, Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd (BCCL). Founded in 1838, BCCL is India’s largest media house, publishing market-leading newspapers and magazine such as The Times of India, The Economic Times, Femina, and Filmfare. "NetApp has provided us the operational advantages while controlling the cost of ownership and enhancing our competitive edge.” "Consolidation and fast data growth were two challenges we faced,” said Mohamed Al Zaabi, ITCS team leader at Zakum Development Company in Abu Dhabi, UAE. "The NetApp SAN solution has allowed us to easily provision storage and cost-effectively consolidate. NetApp has enabled us to deploy a solution that not only meets current requirements, but also will scale to deliver the performance and capacity we’ll need in the future.” NetApp SAN solutions are based on Data ONTAP® for a highly optimized, scalable, and flexible operating system. This storage OS provides breakthrough technologies such as FlexVol®, FlexClone®, Snapshot™, and RAID-DP™ and a common architecture across the entire line of NetApp FAS (fabric-attached storage) systems, meeting customer needs from high-end to low-end solutions. As a result, customers have the ultimate solution to meet a wide range of data center needs such as management simplicity, utilization, performance, business continuity, and disaster recovery, as well as interoperability with leading host environments and comprehensive SAN professional services. "Our market success is a direct result of our passion for helping our customers manage the overwhelming complexity and data proliferation in their data centers,” said Joel Reich, general manager of the SAN Business Unit at Network Appliance. "As evidenced by our traction in both the FC SAN and IP SAN markets, customers continue to rely on our solutions and believe that we have the most compelling SAN value proposition in the market. We will continue to innovate and deliver solutions that provide strategic value for customers’ enterprise business applications and data center infrastructure.” For more information and technical details about the right NetApp SAN solution to meet your needs, visit www.netapp.com/products/storage-systems/enterprise-storage/index.html. About Network Appliance NetApp is a leading provider of innovative data management solutions that simplify the complexity of storing, managing, protecting, and retaining enterprise data. Market leaders around the world choose NetApp to help them reduce cost, minimize risk, and adapt to change. For solutions that deliver unmatched simplicity and value, visit us on the Web at www.netapp.com. NetApp, Data ONTAP, FlexClone, and FlexVol are registered trademarks and Network Appliance, RAID-DP and Snapshot are trademarks 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.