Data ONTAP 8 and Other New Technologies and Solutions Provide Customers With Powerful Foundation to Enable IT as a Service

SUNNYVALE, CA -- (Marketwire) -- 08/25/09 -- To empower customers who are rapidly changing the way their data centers are designed and shifting to a model of IT delivered as a service (ITaaS), NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) today unveiled Data ONTAP® 8 along with other new technologies and solutions that will serve as the cloud infrastructure foundation for today and tomorrow.

"Today's announcements truly usher in a new era and way of doing business for NetApp," said Tom Georgens, president and chief executive officer, NetApp. "Customer dynamics are changing in the face of increased economic pressures as IT executives are tasked with doing more with less. As a result, the makeup of the data center is drastically changing as companies choose to take advantage of applications, infrastructure, and platforms delivered in the form of services. NetApp is primed to take advantage of this major shift in the market by providing enterprises with not only the industry-leading storage and data management solutions that are ideal for the cloud, but, more importantly, also serve as the technology partner of choice to guide enterprises on their journey in deploying a cloud infrastructure."

Enterprise customers, global systems integrators, and service providers are already leveraging existing Data ONTAP platforms as the foundation for a wide range of their internal and external cloud deployments. Data ONTAP 8 will build upon these proven cloud capabilities with enhanced functionality for virtualized and shared infrastructure environments, including nondisruptive data mobility, dynamic growth through a scale-out architecture, and 64-bit storage aggregates to support multipetabyte deployments. Data ONTAP 8 will also provide customers with improved data management capabilities and tighter integration with data center orchestration and management systems, enabling the storage, server, networking, and application layers to interface with one another. The Data ONTAP 8 family combines Data ONTAP 7G and Data ONTAP GX under a single code base in a phased approach that will allow customers to leverage the combined scale-up and scale-out capabilities.

With the addition of these new innovative and enhanced capabilities, Data ONTAP 8 provides customers with a platform that meets their stringent cloud requirements and addresses their challenges in deploying a cloud storage infrastructure, including:

• Secure Multi-Tenancy -- Customers can deploy a shared, cost-effective infrastructure across separate user groups or enterprise customers with NetApp's proven technology called MultiStore®.
• Transparent Data Motion -- Customers can achieve nondisruptive data access during mandatory shutdowns or upgrades and respond quickly and transparently within a single-site or across multi-site distributed deployments.
• Service Automation -- Customers can leverage a comprehensive set of role-based data management and monitoring tools to meter usage and enable a charge-back model, significantly reducing operational costs and improving service response time.
• Storage Efficiency -- Customers can improve ROI for raw storage purchases and reduce data center space, power, and cooling.
• Integrated Data Protection -- Customers can deploy built-in backup/recovery and business continuity capabilities, which are a necessity for shared infrastructures that must always be on.

"While Data ONTAP provides a wide range of enterprises with storage solutions that fuel their cloud infrastructures, Data ONTAP 8 will take it to the next level by providing enhanced scalability, performance, efficiencies, and other features that are key to the cloud," said Terri McClure, analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "Combine this technology foundation with its impressive lineup of cloud enablement partners and NetApp has clearly strengthened its position as a true cloud storage infrastructure provider."

New Products, Solutions, and Services Empower the Cloud

The following new NetApp® products, solutions, and services address customers' critical cloud requirements for a more efficient and flexible cloud infrastructure:

• NetApp Data Motion(TM) -- NetApp's new data motion technology allows enterprises to move data nondisruptively across storage systems with zero application downtime.