Rapid Adoption of De-Dup by NetApp Customers

NetApp announced that the deduplication adoption
rate among its customers has tripled since November 2007, with more
than 3,500 systems and 100 petabytes (PB) of raw storage capacity,
solidifying NetApp as a leader in deduplication technology. NetApp now
has more than 1,000 customers who have deployed NetApp deduplication
across all tiers of data, including primary, backup, and archival data,
making it the only vendor to offer end-to-end deduplication.

Deduplication technology, which plays an important role in
virtualized environments, is quickly gaining traction with customers
who struggle with data proliferation and the headaches that are
associated with it. Now customers can eliminate redundant data quickly
and easily, which improves space and power efficiencies, and reduces
the amount of raw storage required. Furthermore, NetApp deduplication
strengthens NetApp’s portfolio of space-saving technologies, which also
include RAID 6, thin provisioning and flexible clones. Like these other
space-saving technologies, NetApp deduplication is a core part of the
Data ONTAP operating system, so it is available across the complete
FAS family of systems, and all classes of storage. NetApp is the only
major storage and data management vendor to embed deduplication
technology across its entire line of storage systems.

"There is a definite trend in the market today to virtualize
storage environments," said Heidi Biggar, analyst, Enterprise Strategy
Group. "Deduplication is just one example. Organizations are embracing
deduplication because of the efficiencies it provides their
organizations, significantly reducing the amount of physical capacity
that must be purchased and managed. By making deduplication available
across its storage portfolio via Data ONTAP, NetApp makes it easier for
organizations to leverage deduplication throughout their environments.
NetApp has clearly become a leader in this space."

Dexma, a company that creates and hosts mortgage lending software
for financial institutions, is a NetApp customer that has leveraged
deduplication to help realize greater data storage management
capabilities. By combining NetApp and VMware solutions, Dexma has
created a virtual environment that enhances storage provisioning and
increases Dexma’s ability to more easily scale its storage system to
meet its data management needs.

Since the installation of NetApp deduplication in September 2007,
Dexma has recovered much of its previously utilized disk space. This
has freed up crucial disk space to be used by other applications and
has enabled Dexma to efficiently manage its current business-critical
data.

"We were able to decrease our storage requirements for our
customer file retention by 35%," said David Waterhouse, senior system
administrator, Dexma Inc. "NetApp deduplication provided us with an
easy but valuable way of conserving space on our storage systems. This
has had a direct effect on our bottom line."

"Our IBM System Storage N series customers truly value the space
and power efficiencies that are provided by deduplication," said
Stephen Grillo, manager, Worldwide N series Marketing at IBM.
"Technological advancements in data deduplication across the industry
are making this a must-have feature for many of our customers. We know
how important features such as virtualization, policy management, and
deduplication are to customers, and through our partnership with NetApp
we are providing them with a choice of data deduplication technology."

Deduplication, which is free of charge to customers as an inherent
feature in all NetApp storage systems, will also be free when it is
extended to NetApp’s Virtual Tape Library (VTL) offering later this
year. The deduplication option for NearStore VTL will dramatically
reduce the cost of storing backups on disk by providing effective
storage capacities that are greater than today’s systems.

In January 2008, Forrester Research cited NetApp as a leader in The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Open Systems Virtual Tape
Libraries, Q1 2008 report. Forrester identified NetApp as having one
of the strongest product strategies for its NearStore VTL offering. The
report, which helps clients make informed decisions when selecting a
vendor, evaluates vendors against a comprehensive set of criteria and
assesses the state of the enterprise open systems VTL market.

"Deduplication has become a core element of our storage system
offerings as more and more customers grapple with data growth
proliferation," said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Solutions
Marketing for NetApp. "Deduplication helps our customers control this
growth while reducing costs and simplifying data. At the same time,
it’s apparent that customers are rethinking their traditional data
backup approaches as VTL becomes more prevalent. Through our innovation
we will continue to address customer needs, which will include
extending deduplication to our VTL offering."

In addition to VTL deduplication technology, NetApp continues to
innovate to maintain its leadership in the open systems VTL market.
Recent hardware and software updates introduced in March of 2008 have
more than doubled the maximum usable storage capacity of NearStore VTL
and increased write-compressed performance by up to 20%, enabling
enterprise customers to protect more data in less time with one of the
fastest, most scalable products on the market.

NetApp