NetApp Refreshs FAS2000 With Entry Level Product

Midsize businesses are under pressure to keep pace with growing business demands and to do more with fewer resources. Many of these businesses have turned to virtualization to improve cost savings, modernize their applications, and consolidate their IT infrastructure to gain a competitive advantage. As data volumes continue to expand at explosive rates and demands on the business continue to expand beyond IT budgets, the decisions these companies make now about their IT infrastructure are foundational to their business success.

NetApp, Inc. has strengthened its entry product and solutions portfolio for midsize businesses to deliver value to both customers and partners. The new NetApp FAS2000 entry product line delivers improved value, simplicity, performance, and scalability to enable customers to start and grow with the needs of their businesses.

"Midsize businesses are facing unique challenges as a result of increasing business demands and the need to do more with fewer resources," said Tom Georgens, president and chief executive officer, NetApp. "We understand that customers should not be forced to make a tradeoff between affordability and ‘good enough’ technology. With solutions that are priced and packaged to address this growing market, NetApp is uniquely positioned to help our customers succeed and build a solid foundation that can expand and adapt as their business and priorities change."

Enhanced Midsize Business Portfolio Delivers:

• Performance and Scalability: New FAS2240, the latest offering in NetApp’s entry FAS2000 series, delivers two to three times performance improvement and flexibility, allowing customers to maximize storage investments, support demanding workloads, and add enhanced capabilities as needed as their business needs change.
• Simplicity: OnCommand System Manager 2.0 is designed for the IT generalist to simplify, control, and automate both setup and ongoing management of NetApp storage. This simple management tool is provided with the purchase of these systems to help customers improve their storage and service efficiency, boost productivity, and reduce the impact of storage management on limited IT resources.
• Data ONTAP: The FAS2000 series runs the latest version of the Data ONTAP operating system to provide customers with a unified, scalable platform that supports multiple workloads and delivers the flexibility to meet their growing business requirements.
• Unified, Scalable Architecture: NetApp offers an unified, scalable architecture that enables customers to upgrade to higher-end systems and new capabilities without the need for forklift upgrades. NetApp’s unified platform helps customers to meet current and future requirements for architecting scalable, efficient, and flexible infrastructures.
• Efficiency: While other storage vendors offer only one or two storage efficiency technologies, NetApp offers nine integrated technologies, which have helped customers save $11 billion and more than 4.6 exabytes of storage (Data from My AutoSupport, a Web-based tool that offers a view into the health, performance, and storage efficiency of any NetApp storage system) in total.

History with Midsize Businesses

• NetApp brings a track record in the midsize business segment, and more than 10,000 midsize businesses turn to NetApp each year for their storage needs.
• The company is recognized by third parties and has been declared a top vendor in numerous categories for delivering outstanding customer value, innovative technology, and product quality.
• Storage Magazine ranked NetApp the number one solution for virtualized environments, and the company also earned the publication’s top spot in the Quality Award survey for midrange systems.
• TheInfoPro, based on their methodology of one-on-one interviews with storage professionals, identifies NetApp as the lead vendor in use by midsize enterprises for optimization technologies including SSD cache and online data reduction/deduplication.
• According to Forrester Research Inc.’s Market Overview: Midrange Storage, Q32011 report issued August 29, 2011, "NetApp provides the leading unified solution. It continues to expand its portfolio and grow within the market."

NetApp Partner Program Fueling
Midsize Customer Success

• NetApp’s strategy to leverage diverse pathways for growth has played an important role in furthering the company’s success in the midsize business segment.
• A component of this strategy is NetApp’s commitment to its vast ecosystem of channel partners, who serve as advisors to the midsize business segment and give NetApp a pathway to these customers.
• Enhanced product portfolio, pricing, and packaging options optimized for midsize businesses, enable NetApp partners to offer the technologies and solutions to grow their own businesses, increase profits, and help their customers succeed.
• The Maia Strategy Group recently conducted a survey of channel resellers worldwide who are part of the NetApp Partner Program and who also partner with other storage vendors. According to the analysis: The partners surveyed align with NetApp because of the strong value proposition that NetApp’s technology offers midsize business customers; these partners view NetApp as having superior technology for the midsize market when compared to other vendors; the study revealed that partners view NetApp products as competitive for the middle and upper end of the midsize business market, citing flexibility and adaptability across a range of systems as key advantages for NetApp solutions.

Brian Babineau, vice president, Enterprise Strategy Group, said: "In today’s challenging economic environment, it is very easy to focus on making IT buying decisions based on acquisition cost. Unfortunately, far too many midsize businesses realize that operational expenses involving system tuning, application integration, and solution availability can quickly outpace an initial investment. We consistently advise these organizations to consider IT infrastructure offerings that can support a variety of workloads allowing limited resources to achieve management economies of scale."

Chelo Picardal, chief technology officer, City of Bellevue, said: "As a growing, thriving metropolis with 35% annual data growth and limited resources, the City of Bellevue is constantly striving to do more with less and make the most of its IT investments. Our NetApp storage solution has enabled us to meet expanding business demands amid budget reductions. With NetApp we have gained outstanding performance, scalability, and efficiency, resulting in better services to our customers – the city departments that serve our growing population of more than 122,000 residents."

Tim Torres, vice president, Technical Operations, Merced Systems, said: "Our IT staff is comprised of a very small team of IT generalists supporting multiple functions across the organization. As our business continues to grow, ease of use, reliability, and automation are all key criteria that we look at as we evaluate any technologies we deploy. NetApp has met all of those requirements and delivered powerful capabilities, scalability, and flexibility to help us control costs, maximize our investment, and yield the highest payback."

Ken Danila, IT operations manager, VHB, said: "At VHB, our primary focus is on helping our customers solve the nation’s most complex transportation, land development and environmental infrastructure and development challenges. NetApp’s storage solutions are central to connecting the two most vital assets for the success of our business: our people and our data. Choosing NetApp is one of the smartest decisions I have made at VHB, and they have done a great job of addressing the midsize market with an enterprise-class solution that is simple, scalable, and offered at an attractive price point."

Julie Parrish, senior vice president of Global Partner Sales, NetApp, said: "NetApp’s history of success in the midsize business market can be attributed to our strong and enduring partnerships. With today’s announcement, NetApp is combining powerful solutions for midsize businesses with the best partner program in the industry to create compelling opportunities for continued partner success now and into the future."

Availability and Pricing
As part of this announcement, NetApp is offering new lower pricing options for both the FAS2040 and FAS2240 to deliver greater value and long-term savings, allowing customers to grow their business without outgrowing their storage investments. The FAS2000 series systems start at under $7,500 and can be ordered through NetApp’s worldwide network of value-added authorized resellers, distributors, and systems integrators.

Other quotes:

Norbert E. Kopp, ABO-Storage Distribution, AG, Switzerland, said: "More and more companies identify storage as a strategic asset dedicated to future growth. They look for a solution that protects their investment, delivers a fast ROI and is easy to deploy and manage. NetApp’s new unified storage offering, the FAS2240 offers a simple and smart product, that especially small and midsize companies value, as it offers them a flexible and powerful product designed for storing data efficiently while reducing management costs."

Christian Jandl, CIO, ALPEN-MAYKESTAG GmbH, said: "The more business processes and servers a virtualized environment contains, the more important is the quality of the IT infrastructure and the right partners. Recognized for its high quality precision and high performance tools, ALPEN-MAYKESTAG strives to reflect that claim also in IT. Together with NetApp we are doing very well. The FAS2000 platform just runs smoothly, and NetApp’s software portfolio provides us with highly efficient functions that accelerate and protect our processes, while providing us with the headroom to meet new requirements."

Paul Sweeney, Managing Director, ANS Group plc, said: "Customers know that just buying storage is not the point today. They look for smart solutions that are easy to handle, help them grow and offer rich functionality at a sound price. NetApp’s new FAS2240 is a perfect match for these requirements. Its innovative unified architecture and advanced storage efficiency build the ground for a completely new IT infrastructure set for higher flexibility and less management costs. Its dynamic scalability adds to the flexibility a company needs at any time."

Jean-Philippe Bosseur, Global IT Director, Arthur D. Little, said: "Innovative management matters in both business and IT. Today, our shared infrastructure is our foundation to act faster and meet any business requirement. Also in terms of cost savings, the investment in NetApp has paid off. Combining the space savings gained along with the reduction in staff, we have achieved an ROI in under a year."

William Chu, President, Avnet Technology Solutions, Asia Pacific, said: "The collaboration between Avnet and NetApp has proven success both globally and regionally. With the uncertainty in global growth and the economy, customers have constant changing demands and are looking for improved value, scalability and simplicity in storage solutions. The features offered in NetApp’s new models target to midsize businesses fit nicely into these growing market segments. Avnet and NetApp will continue to invest and strengthen our channel partners’ ecosystems to offer value-added solutions to our partners and their customers to tap on these growing markets together."

Greg Flanik, Chief Information Officer, Baldwin-Wallace College, said: "With NetApp, we have achieved amazing results and have lowered our IT costs by 45%. The affordability and efficiencies we gained with our NetApp storage system resulted in major cost savings and a payback on our investment in the first 12 months. In a midsize environment where people need to be multifaceted, the simplicity is key in enabling our team of IT generalists to manage our NetApp storage infrastructure and free up valuable time and expertise to focus on the business."

Alexander Freudenberg, Product Manager, Bechtle Logistik & Service GmbH, said: "We really appreciate that NetApp provides customers with product innovation and simplicity. The new FAS2240 is clearly positioned to accelerate the move of midsize companies to a unified architecture as a solid and scalable foundation for their IT helping them to go further, faster."

WANG Chao, Vice President, Beijing Co-Founding Network Technology Co., LTD, said: "The NetApp FAS2240 enhances the overall level of NetApp entry products by providing higher performance to support greater capacity. It can fully meet the growing storage and performance needs of SMEs nowadays. It is a cost-effective product because of its price and software structure which enables end-users of domestic small and medium enterprises to use the world’s top storage brand and gain the benefits of NetApp unified storage. It can be converted to the disk frame design, making it easier to upgrade, protecting customers’ investments. From perspective of a partner, the FAS2240 makes it easier to convince customers to accept NetApp’s products since it has a greater advantage over other brands, and will surely promote the performance growth of BCF and NetApp."

Satinder Sethi, Director for Server, Access, and Virtualization Technology Group at Cisco Systems, said: "As midsize customers balance their need to scale for their future growth with simplified solutions that can be rapidly deployed, Cisco is working with NetApp and other partners to deliver cost-effective pre-tested cloud infrastructure solutions to address these needs. With NetApp, Cisco is working to combine the scalability, flexibility, and manageability of Cisco UCS with NetApp storage to achieve maximum return on investment, while eliminating the need for costly forklift upgrades."

Suzanne Gallagher, Senior Vice President, Marketing, Datalink, said: "Midsize businesses don’t want to compromise when it comes to storage solution performance, efficiency, and scalability. NetApp’s new FAS2000 product line delivers on all fronts, including an affordable price. The FAS2000 line fits the needs of midsize companies focused on doing more with less and doesn’t require them to compromise."

Sanjiv Khushu, CEO and Director, E Micro Data Technologies Pvt Ltd., said: "The midmarket in India is an emerging segment whose unique needs demand a specialist approach from technology vendors as well as partners. NetApp’s storage solutions help address the need for enterprise-class functionalities at lower investments, while at the same time providing the flexibility and seamless scalability that will help customers’ IT keep pace with rapid business growth. As a partner I believe this solution will help us drive greater value for customers in this segment, in turn offering us a strong business opportunity."

Riccardo Maiarelli, CEO, ICOS, said: "With the new NetApp FAS2000 entry product line, NetApp delivers the ideal storage solutions for our customers in the midsize market. It offers customers a truly unified approach at a compelling price point helping them build a flexible and secure storage infrastructure while reducing management costs. Thanks to NetApp’s proven software functionality, customers choosing the new low-end are well positioned for future growth while protecting their investment."

Bob Kelly, Corporate Vice President, Server and Tools Business, Microsoft Corp., said: "Microsoft and NetApp have collaborated for more than a decade and bring a proven track record of delivering innovative joint solutions that leverage key technologies from both organizations, allowing customers to achieve greater efficiency, flexibility, and business value. Working together, both NetApp and Microsoft are helping customers reduce costs, increase reliability, simplify management, and respond quickly to changing business needs through the deep integration of our server, virtualization, management and storage technologies."

Felix Losan, IT Director, Pierre Lang Europe Handelsgesellschaft mbH, said: "NetApp unified storage ideally supports our business model and meets the requirements of a midsized enterprise such as ours. A short learning curve for the system management allowed us to develop, test, and realize our ideas rapidly."

Johan Milbrink, Data Center Practice Manager, Presidio Networked Solutions, said: "We are very excited about the launch of NetApp’s new FAS2000 product line. Every day, Presidio helps clients leverage advanced IT solutions to achieve breakthrough gains in business performance. Our midsize clients in particular demand proven solutions that support their aggressive growth goals and yield efficiencies in their IT organization. Just like larger, enterprise organizations, our midsize clients face increasingly complex storage challenges and are under tremendous pressure to do more with less. The new FAS2000 product line provides an attractive option for clients looking for a scalable storage solution that is value-priced and easy to deploy. It will no doubt be a big winner in the marketplace."

Yeouido, Sung-Sik Lee, Team Leader, Information Support Team, St. Mary’s Hospital, said: "St. Mary’s Hospital built a NetApp solution three years ago as its PACS backup system and has achieved great success. For our virtualization project, we dramatically reduced our storage costs, one of the biggest costs in desktop virtualization, using NetApp storage. Since NetApp supports both SAN and NAS from one storage system, we are able to achieve greater flexibility in a virtualized environment. In advance, synergy effect is expected because of its optimization in VMware environments."

David Hekimian, CTO, Trace3, said: "At Trace3, our customers are always asking us to not only listen to their business challenges, but to help deliver IT solutions that match their business needs. NetApp’s updates to the FAS2000 product line help Trace3 deliver powerful and efficient technology solutions that fit the varying needs of our customers’ business today and into the future."

Gary Green, Vice President, Global Strategic Alliances, VMware, said: "In today’s economy, midsize companies require solutions that will allow them to do more with limited resources, respond faster to growing business demands and achieve greater IT efficiency. NetApp and VMware address these key requirements by providing a cost-effective and flexible joint solution optimized to take advantage of the full benefit of virtualization with greater cost savings, higher availability, scalability and data protection. Working together, NetApp and VMware provide a tightly integrated solution to help customers start right and grow smart with an efficient infrastructure to handle future growth."