Features - Storage Innovations:

NETWORK APPLIANCE DEBUTS NEW MANAGEMENT SOLUTIONS

Network Appliance Inc has announced management products, programs, and partnerships that enable simple, single-point control of storage appliances within a data infrastructure and help maintain business continuance. These products, programs, and partners are a vital component of Network Appliance's evolution into a full-line storage supplier for today's data-intensive enterprise and allow Network Appliance to offer customers industry-leading storage management tools designed for SAN and NAS topologies.

"Simplicity has always been a Network Appliance hallmark, and bringing our appliance simplicity to SANs is a cornerstone of the Network Appliance SAN strategy," said Mark Santora, senior vice president of marketing at Network Appliance. "The only way to achieve true simplicity is with robust, easy-to-use management tools -- either provided directly by Network Appliance or by a trusted third party whose management framework transcends storage products and oversees an entire enterprise IT infrastructure. Our new solutions offer powerful storage management and by opening up the power of Data ONTAP to developers through our Manage ONTAP API and our DataFabric Management Services program, we can more tightly integrate our management utilities with the world's leading application providers. Finally, by working closely with the world's storage management leaders, Network Appliance can offer customers better, faster, and easier data management in a truly open environment. We believe this is the most comprehensive storage management approach in the industry, and believe our customers will benefit from this new level of management integration, ease, and flexibility."

Product Details

At the heart of the new NetApp management solutions portfolio is the latest version of DataFabric Manager -- DataFabric Manager 2.1 -- a powerful tool that enables centralized management of dispersed NetApp data storage solutions in SAN or NAS enterprise environments. DataFabric Manager 2.1 manages new and legacy NetApp NAS devices, NetCache appliances, and NearStore products, as well as the newly announced FAS900 series products, which can operate in SAN and/or NAS mode based on software protocols. As the "control board" for all Network Appliance storage solutions, DataFabric Manager provides an instant view and assessment of the total existing NetApp storage resources within an enterprise's IT organization.

Network Appliance SnapDrive 2.0 software is also integral to the NetApp management solution, offering customers a high-performance, scalable solution for managing their mission-critical application deployments in Windows environments, while improving availability and recovery time. SnapDrive allows administrators to easily create virtual disks from pools of storage that may be distributed among several storage appliances. Mission-critical applications for databases and messaging such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Lotus Notes, and Microsoft Exchange greatly benefit from the virtualization and snapshot management capabilities offered by SnapDrive. And when integrated with SnapManager for Microsoft Exchange, SnapDrive offers advanced disaster recovery and data protection capabilities for Microsoft Exchange environments.

VFM (Virtual File Manager) enables storage administrators to reduce downtime and eliminate any client re-configurations in the event of a disaster or business interruption. VFM creates a machine-independent logical view of the global enterprise Windows file system, removing the dependency of hard name mapping of shares, directories, and servers so clients do not need to modify scripts and mappings when their data is backed up or migrated to a new location. In the event of a disaster or business interruption, Windows clients are transparently redirected to the backup storage system or NearStore in a secondary data center with no reconfiguration or networking rerouting required, restoring access to files in seconds.

Program Details

Network Appliance also unveiled the DataFabric Management Services program. The program supports a wide range of partners including storage management, application, database, service, and information management vendors with technical assistance, software developers' kits, and joint marketing initiatives. More details on the Network Appliance DataFabric Management Services program are available online.

Through the DataFabric Management Services program, Network Appliance will deliver Manage ONTAP API, releasing the power of NetApp systems to application partners who want to tightly integrate their solutions for maximum functionality, performance and interoperability The API will allow partners to create value-added applications for NetApp storage appliances and enhance the breadth of integrated solutions offered to customers. The Manage ONTAP software developers' kit will be available in early 2003.

Partner Details

Complementing DataFabric Manager, SnapDrive, VFM, Manage ONTAP, and the DataFabric Management Services API program are partnerships and technology agreements Network Appliance has with AppIQ, BMC Software, CA, NuView, and Precise Software's Storage Solutions Division. All these partners have announced support for the FAS900 series and have worked closely with Network Appliance to create integrated management solutions that deliver maximum simplicity and functionality. These enhanced partnerships and technology agreements with world leaders in infrastructure management tools will help increase market acceptance of NetApp SAN solutions, and will open up a wide range of new, simplified storage management options for enterprise customers whose data and storage management tools for SAN have to date been woefully lacking or prohibitively complex.

"AppIQ is pleased to be partnering with Network Appliance as it expands its success in the NAS market to encompass a full line of storage solutions," said Doug Cahill, vice president of business development and strategy, AppIQ. "As an inaugural partner of the FAS900 series solution, AppIQ is collaborating with Network Appliance to deliver CIM-based management through the development of a CIM provider. By leveraging the CIM/WBEM standard, AppIQ and Network Appliance are paving the road to fully integrated storage management in a unified storage environment."

"BMC Software proudly partners with Network Appliance and we're very excited about their unified storage launch," said Helmuth Klemm, vice president and general manager, Enterprise Storage Management, BMC Software. "The combination of Network Appliance's unified storage capabilities and BMC's application-centric storage management methodology provides our joint customers with a cost effective, open storage solution enabling them to effectively manage their IT enterprise."

"To meet their expanding eBusiness storage requirements, customers require increasingly cost-effective and scalable storage hardware and enterprise class storage management solutions," said Gary McGuire, senior vice president BrightStor solutions, CA. "Through this partnership, CA and Network Appliance are delivering these critical elements in a fully integrated, open storage management solution that combines CA's leading BrightStor suite of products with NetApp's new full-line enterprise storage solutions."

NuView CEO Rahul Mehta added, "We are delighted to extend our relationship with NetApp, a pioneer and leader in enterprise storage solutions. Adding VFM to the NetApp family of products creates an unbeatable single-vendor enterprise storage solution that combines the world's leading storage devices with comprehensive storage management for Windows enterprises. This is an outstanding opportunity for NuView, as it establishes VFM as the industry standard in file virtualization and Windows storage management solutions and provides us access to NetApp's extensive customer base."

"We are excited about the announcement of Network Appliance's new unified storage solution and DataFabric Management Services API program," said Najaf Husain, president and General Manager of Precise Software's Storage Solutions Division. "We have been working closely with NetApp to expand our NetApp filer support with SiteStor SRM to also include the real-time policy and control capabilities of our award-winning StorageCentral SRM solution for NetApp filers. This joint engineering effort will enable tight integration of our industry-leading product lines. Our mutual enterprise customers who are looking for ways to manage their network-attached storage and storage area network deployments will ultimately benefit from this strategic alliance."

As Network Appliance expands its open management strategy over time, the company will continue to focus on broad interoperability, performance tuning, and maximum configuration simplicity to empower customers to use existing IT infrastructure tools to manage storage subsystems. Open management for Network Appliance will entail managing storage of any kind -- be it NAS or SAN. With the world's only unified storage architecture, Network Appliance is in a unique position to realize the promises of open management and is committed to solving additional management problems that are central to customers' storage demands.

About Network Appliance

Network Appliance is a world leader in open network storage solutions for today's data-intensive enterprise. Since its inception in 1992, Network Appliance has pioneered technology, product, and partner firsts that continue to drive the evolution of storage. Information about Network Appliance solutions and services is available at www.netapp.com.

Contact: Eric Brown, Network Appliance Inc, Eric Brown, 408-822-3463, ebrown@netapp.com.