STORAGE

NetApp today announced the addition of the FAS3160 and V3160, strengthening its current series of midrange storage offerings for customers. As part of today's news, NetApp unveiled its plans to enable 8Gb Fibre Channel (FC) support and provide enterprise flash Solid-State Drive (SSD) storage and flash-based caching modules for its FAS and V-Series products, helping customers to further enhance their data center infrastructures through improvedperformance, lower cost, and increased efficiencies. The FAS3160 joins the FAS3140 and FAS3170 models, offering customers improved price/performance, flexibility, and scalability over other midrange storage systems. The NetApp FAS3100 series of storage systems offers customers a single unified storage architecture to meet their needs and a common suite of application-aware software and management tools that are part of the Data ONTAP operating system. In addition, with features such as thin provisioning, deduplication, RAID-DP, and FlexClone, customers can boost storage efficiency and performance without breaking the bank. The NetApp V3160 provides customers additional flexibility to meet their diverse and changing business needs by extending the features and capabilities of Data ONTAP, including deduplication, to disk arrays from other storage vendors, such as EMC and HP. "We needed a storage solution for our virtual server hosting service to help address the challenging nature of providing data management solutions to our enterprise client base at an overall cost point that could make the model sustainable," said Matt Stein, VP of Network Services, Primus Telecommunications Canada Inc., a NetApp FAS3100 customer. "NetApp provided us with the performance and capacity desired while also delivering increased efficiencies and flexibility through features like deduplication and thin provisioning. Combined with our VMware solution, Primus is able to provide a high level of service to a broader base of our clientele with pricing that is competitive in the Canadian marketplace." 8Gb FC Support Enables Customers to Better Meet Virtualization Demands NetApp will expand its industry-leading support of 8Gb FC SAN solutions for all NetApp FAS and V-Series storage systems to deliver additional value and performance. Customers can now augment their virtualized data centers by addressing their server virtualization demands on storage networks while improving investment protection. Customers who upgrade to an 8Gb SAN can achieve higher performance and cost efficiencies because of shortened recovery times, increased productivity, faster data access, and increased throughput for virtualized servers. Also, the addition of an 8Gb target host bus adapter will enable FAS and V-Series customers toeasily upgradesystemswith no additional training. "As more customers move to virtualized data centers, their networking and storage requirements become more pronounced," said Rajiv Ramaswami, VP and general manager of the Data Center Switching Technology Group at Cisco. "With the new Cisco 8Gbps line cards for the Cisco MDS 9500 Series within NetApp's SAN switching portfolio, customers gain better end-to-end performance, scalability, and manageability in their virtualizeddata centers, while at the same time fully preserving their existing investment in their SAN infrastructure." NetApp Storage Systems Will Be Flash Ready NetApp also unveiled today that the new FAS3160, V3160, and other FAS and V-Series storage systems will be enterprise flash ready. As part of its innovative strategy, NetApp will combine flash memory with its unified storage architecture to meet the performance needs of both leading-edge and mainstream IT professionals. Unlike other storage vendors, NetApp will give customers practical options by using flash memory both as persistent storage and also for caching purposes. Leveraging flash memory as a modular read cache in the storage controller enables customers to have a cost-effective way to optimize performance for common enterprise applications. Furthermore, NetApp's unified storage architecture expands on the benefits of flash memory by multiplying customer savings of power, cooling, and space through the use of deduplication and other storage efficiency features. New Integrated Suite of eSupport Tools Provides End-to-End Support New next-generation support automation tools provide customers with additional ease of use and complete end-to-end support for all FAS and V-Series systems. This integrated support toolset combines NetApp AutoSupport, NetApp Premium AutoSupport, and the NetApp Remote Support Diagnostics Tool to provide customers with high levels of storage availability and performance. NetApp AutoSupport is recognized as the industry's leading "call home" tool and a built-in system monitoring capability available to all NetApp customers at no additional charge. By monitoring hundreds of system parameters with the ability to, in most cases, resolve issues without customer intervention, NetApp AutoSupport catches small issues before they become bigger problems that can negatively impact customer applications. Premium AutoSupport complements the baseline AutoSupport capability by providing the customer with the capability to do storage configuration management, autogenerated software upgrade plans, trend analysis, and performance trending. The NetApp Remote Support Diagnostics Tool provides faster remote 24x7 diagnostics and case resolution by NetApp Technical Support, resulting in reduced customer involvement in diagnostics and troubleshooting. "NetApp has created support automation tools that help ensure its support infrastructure meets the needs of mission-critical enterprise environments," said Matt Healey, research manager, IDC Software and Hardware Support Services."With new product and technologies, customers now more than ever require support that is 24x7, includes minimal customer intervention, provides rapid response and resolution, and is highly secure. NetApp is addressing these needs with the new eSupport suite." To learn more about these industry-leading tools that differentiate NetApp support, visit its Web site. "Data center customers are looking for ways to reduce their costs, increase efficiencies, and boost performance," said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Solutions Marketing, NetApp. "Our flashroadmapand expanded 8Gb FC support are two key components that deliver these benefits to customers. With our unique approach to flash storage, customers will not only experience streamlined management and increased performance, but will do so while reducing their power, cooling, and space needs. At the same time, 8Gb FC support enables customers to fully utilize their virtualized environments in order to take advantage of the cost efficiencies and increased production associated with this architecture." To listen to Jay Kidd, chief marketing officer at NetApp, discuss NetApp's flash strategy, listen to the NetApp TechTalk podcast at its Web site. Also, for more information on NetApp's approach to flash technology, read the white paper "Flash Memory Technology in Enterprise Storage," at its Web site. For information on NetApp's unified storage architecture, visit its Web site. Discuss this news in the NetApp Community, where you can exchange thoughts and ideason a variety of topics with ourcommunity members. Collaborate with our company, engage in conversation with NetApp leaders and employees, and participate in our passion to go further, faster. Join now at its Web site. Pricing and Availability Customer pricing for products described in this press release is available from NetApp sales or reseller partners. The FAS/V3160 system and the eSupport product suite are available immediately. The add-on 8Gb adapter for NetApp FAS and V-Series, to enable 8Gb FC support, will be available in February 2009.The first flash plug-ins will be available in Q2 of 2009.