NetApp and Microsoft Three-Year Pact

NetApp, Inc. and Microsoft Corp. announced a new three-year agreement that deepens product collaboration and technical integration, and extends joint sales and marketing activities to customers worldwide.

Under the new agreement, the two companies will collaborate and deliver technology solutions that span virtualization, private cloud computing, and storage and data management, enabling customers to increase data center management efficiencies, reduce costs, and improve business agility.

"Microsoft is committed to driving highly scalable dynamic datacenter solutions with innovative partners like NetApp," said Bob Kelly, corporate vice president of infrastructure server marketing, Server and Tools Business at Microsoft. "Through the deeper integration of server, virtualization, management and storage technologies, Microsoft and NetApp customers can expect data center solutions that help them reduce costs, increase performance and reach new levels of efficiency."

"The NetApp and Microsoft alliance has helped thousands of enterprise customers around the world do more with less," said Tom Georgens, president and CEO of NetApp. "We are excited about the opportunity we have to build on this success and together help our mutual customers design and implement truly dynamic data centers that can dramatically reduce costs and increase availability, flexibility, and ease of use."

As part of the new strategic alliance agreement, NetApp and Microsoft will expand product collaboration and technical integration activities, including the following areas:

• Virtualized infrastructure solutions based on Windows Server 2008 R2, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, Microsoft System Center and NetApp storage systems. These solutions can provide reliable data availability and streamlined data management, and can help maximize server and storage utilization by using 50 percent less storage compared to a baseline of traditional storage.
• Storage and data management solutions for Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, and Microsoft SQL Server that improve communications and collaboration, enable faster, better-informed decision making, and greatly accelerate software development and testing.
• Efficient and flexible cloud computing and hosted services solutions that provide integrated data protection, ‘always on’ data access, and a flexible, cost-effective infrastructure.

In addition, NetApp and Microsoft will enable customers to experience firsthand the value of joint solutions at the Microsoft Technology Centers around the world and at industry events. Both companies will participate in engagements with channel partners and industry-leading systems integrators, offering technology solutions that are comprehensive and easy to use.

As further proof to the collaboration between both companies, NetApp, the 2009 Microsoft Storage Solutions Partner of the year, utilizes a variety of Windows Server platform technologies to improve storage system management and streamline backup, recovery, and remote replication in Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V environments. In addition, integration with the Microsoft System Center family of products and additional application-integrated NetApp products help maximize uptime for a wide variety of application environments, including Microsoft Exchange Server, SQL Server and SharePoint Server.