NetApp and VMware Tighten Joint Engineering, Marketing, Service, and Support

Tuesday, 07 August 2007 06:46

Companies Extend Best Practices from More than 3,000 Real-World Deployments to Customers Around the World
Network Appliance, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTAP), a leading provider of storage and data management solutions, announced today that it has strengthened its relationship with VMware, the global leader in software for industry-standard virtualised desktops and servers, to collaborate on joint engineering, marketing, service, and support. This relationship covers many of the best practices in engineering, marketing, customer education and advocacy, service, and support that the two companies have developed over the last few years in real-world deployments at more than 3,000 customer sites. It also underscores that the value of server virtualisation is dramatically increased with the addition of robust networked storage on the back end. Direct-attached storage (DAS) and in-server storage are simply not the answer in enterprise-class virtualised environments.

The NetApp-VMware relationship is designed to enable the two companies to work on joint engineering solutions for advanced application mobility, backup and recovery, and disaster recovery. Together NetApp and VMware are focused on making virtualised server, desktop, and storage infrastructures operate seamlessly to deliver agile, available, and cost-effective IT environments to enterprise customers.

The relationship embodies both companies’ vision for data centres to be built around server virtualisation and storage virtualisation and the companies’ commitment to an open and collaborative business model, emphasising the delivery of high-performance, reliable, interoperable IT solutions based on industry standards.

NetApp and VMware joint engineering projects are also targeted at further simplifying disaster recovery, streamlining test and development environments, optimising storage utilisation of virtual desktop consolidations, and ultimately creating a tightly integrated server-to-storage virtualisation solution that makes next-generation data management real and affordable for the enterprise.

"In our agency, losing data or taking too long to retrieve it negatively impacts our ability to work a case successfully. We are often under court-established timelines, so without timely and reliable access to documents and information, our attorneys can find themselves behind the eight ball in prosecuting a case," said George White, chief information officer at the Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General.

"Having NetApp® storage has really facilitated our move to a VMware virtualised server environment, and together the solutions have allowed us to dramatically minimise the risk and duration of any business downtime."

White continued, "In the old model, if we had to deploy an application, we needed a box to store it on, the server had to be configured with enough storage capacity, and we had to set up the backup process. That’s incredibly inefficient. Today, we just allocate storage on-the-fly, whenever and wherever it’s needed. Everything else is centralised and automated thanks to the interoperability of the VMware and NetApp solutions."

Both companies are now working together to create an enterprise-class support agreement that streamlines case handling, modelling it after successful programs NetApp has in place with its other Global Technology Partners, including SAP, Oracle, Symantec, and Microsoft. Plus, the companies are defining joint best-practice blueprints designed to enable NetApp to work with VMware professional services and partners to deploy optimised server-to-storage virtualised environments.

White went on to say, "We chose VMware and NetApp after considerable research and evaluation and determined that these two products not only met all our requirements but worked extremely well together. The fact that they are now working together on joint engineering, support, and service initiatives will significantly increase the value proposition from our previous investments and we anticipate gaining substantial improvements across the board as these products become even more tightly integrated."

"In recent years, just about every enterprise data centre has begun some form of consolidation and virtualisation effort with a goal of increasing asset utilisation and reducing management and infrastructure costs and making the infrastructure more responsive to the needs of the business," said Tom Georgens, executive vice president and general manager of Enterprise Storage and Product Operations at Network Appliance. "The VMware infrastructure combined with NetApp storage virtualisation solutions allows customers to experience increased resource optimization in a virtualised environment. Not only can customers increase the utilisation of their individual server and storage resources, but they can increase the utilisation of their complete infrastructure, including power, cooling, space, and people, while enjoying the robust and simple-to-use data management and protection capabilities that NetApp offers. These capabilities are available now in our joint sales projects and our future work will make the combined solutions even better."

NetApp has been providing advanced storage solutions for VMware deployments since 2001. For more information on NetApp and VMware joint solutions visit: http://www.netapp.com/rc/bizapps2/vmware.html

About Network Appliance

Network Appliance is a leading provider of innovative data management solutions that simplify the complexities of storing, managing, protecting, and retaining enterprise data. Market leaders around the world choose NetApp to help them reduce cost, minimise risk, and adapt to change. For solutions that deliver unmatched simplicity and value, visit us on the Web at www.netapp.com .

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NetApp is a registered trademark and Network Appliance is a trademark of Network Appliance, Inc., in the U.S. and other countries.

"Safe Harbour" Statement under U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995

The statements regarding joint engineering, marketing, service and support, the creation of a support agreement to streamline case handling, and any future combined solutions are forward looking statements within the meaning of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements include any statement regarding future events or the future financial performance of Network Appliance, Inc. that involves risks or uncertainties. In evaluating these statements, readers should specifically consider various factors that could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those indicated, including without limitation: continuing decline in the general economic conditions, customer demand for products and services, customer acceptance of product architectures, increased competition, ability to meet development schedules, and other important factors as described in Network Appliance, Inc. reports and documents filed from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its mostly recently submitted 10-K and 10-Q.

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