NetApp Milestone: 150,000 Storage Systems Deployed

As it approaches its eight-year anniversary since introducing the industry’s first unified storage system, NetApp, Inc. reached an important milestone of deploying more than 150,000 unified storage systems. The milestone underscores NetApp’s long-standing commitment and significant industry innovation in making unified storage a reality for customers.

"Our customers’ adoption of unified storage over the past eight years validates our technology direction for next-generation virtualized storage architectures. Unified storage is a key requirement for customers, especially as they move to shared infrastructure environments to drive down cost and reduce operational complexity," said Manish Goel, executive vice president of Products at NetApp. "While many of our competitors resisted the technology evolution, NetApp was innovating. We believe that every storage solution provider will need to recognize and react to this significant industry trend and follow NetApp’s lead to remain relevant."

On October 1, 2002, NetApp officially launched its ground-breaking hybrid storage system that offered a very different approach to NAS and SAN convergence. The FAS900 series went beyond traditional file-serving capabilities by also serving up blocks over Fibre Channel, making it the first product of its kind in the industry and marking the advent of the unified storage market.

According to research conducted by analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), unified storage is becoming more common. "More than two-thirds of the organizations surveyed by us are in the process of implementing or evaluating a unified storage infrastructure that consolidates NAS and SAN systems," said Terri McClure, senior analyst, ESG. "By improving the mobility and sharing of data between resources and users in a fluid and cost-effective manner, unified storage can provide both IT and business benefits in almost any environment and can also serve as the perfect back-end to today’s dynamic and increasingly virtualized data centers."

The trend toward server virtualization and consolidation is transforming the way data centers are being designed, built, and managed. Data storage and data management are key elements of this transformation, because successful virtualization deployments depend upon a shared, networked storage infrastructure capable of eliminating the silos of storage associated with various application tiers. This shift toward a shared infrastructure increases the importance of unified storage and enables customers to achieve storage efficiency rates of 85-100% while improving flexibility, increasing scalability, controlling power and cooling, and much more. This is evidenced by the fact that nearly 75% of all of NetApp’s virtualized deployments are based on a unified storage system. Unified storage is a critical component of customers’ shift to a shared infrastructure.

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