NetApp With 30,000 SAN Deployments

NetApp, Inc. announced a milestone in enterprise SAN deployments, with more than 30,000 customer storage area network (SAN) production deployments worldwide. NetApp has more than doubled its SAN business (Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and Fibre Channel over Ethernet) in just two years by providing customers with a list of technologies, including thin provisioning, deduplication on primary storage, and RAID-DP, and maximizing solution partnerships with companies such as Brocade, Cisco, Microsoft, and VMware.

NetApp SAN solutions are based on the Data ONTAP operating system, which provides breakthrough technologies such as FlexVol, FlexClone, Snapshot, and RAID-DP, and on NetApp Unified Storage Architecture across NetApp’s entire line of fabric-attached storage (FAS) systems to meet customers’ needs. NetApp is the only SAN solutions vendor to support iSCSI and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) natively, and also to support network-attached storage (NAS) with a truly unified, single architecture. FCoE is a logical progression of NetApp’s unified storage approach that provides an evolutionary path for Fibre Channel (FC) SAN customers to migrate over time. NetApp helps customers increase utilization and storage efficiency, decrease costs, and combine data protection and disaster recovery capabilities in a single storage platform, while at the same time enjoying industry-leading SAN performance and availability.

According to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker, Q3 2009, NetApp grew faster than the FC SAN market year over year. Compared to 2008, NetApp gained one point of revenue market share, resulting in a revenue share of 6.2% in the first three quarters of 2009. In terms of capacity, NetApp grew two and a half times the rate of the market year over year and held 9.5% capacity share in the FC SAN market in Q1 through Q3 2009.

"We compared several SAN solutions, in some cases from existing vendor relationships," said Thomas Gessel, senior vice president and technology officer at TruWest Credit Union. "Despite the inside track that some storage solutions had, we found that NetApp provided the best overall solution. The flexibility of NFS, SMB 2.X, and Fibre Channel connected storage provides our business with the right type of storage access regardless of the application, and helps us better fulfill our business requirements."

"We were having trouble scaling our storage and finding a reliable backup and recovery routine to cover many disparate systems," said Alekseiv Pavlinik, network administrator at The College of Saint Rose. "That’s why we turned to NetApp. With our NetApp solution, now we have a fast and reliable backup and recovery solution that supports our Fibre Channel, SMB 2.X, and iSCSI systems all on one network, and it just makes our life easier."

"Our growth in the SAN space is undeniable, and underscores our commitment to providing customers with robust technologies and easy-to-manage environments," said Joel Reich, vice president and general manager of the SAN/iSAN Business Unit at NetApp. "By offering our customers a full range of solutions that address their high-performance and storage efficiency needs, we will continue to drive this tremendous growth across our SAN business."