NetApp strengthens MSE momentum with new enhancements to its FAS2000 Series

Johannesburg, 16 September 2009 - Showing its commitment to mid-size enterprise (MSE) and distributed enterprise customers, NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) today announced enhancements to its entry-level FAS2000 product family. The family's latest member, FAS2040, provides customers with increased performance and capacity to handle demanding Microsoft Windows consolidation and virtualisation workloads on the same system. NetApp also announced significant price reductions on its FAS2020 systems and associated software. The FAS2040 complements the existing FAS2020 and FAS2050 to a family of three ready to provide excellent value for a variety of customers needs in the fast growing MSE market. The new FAS2000 family will further strengthen NetApp's momentum in the MSE arena as it is ideally suited to cover MSE customers' needs for scalability, performance, data protection and storage efficiency.

“The MSE market is one of the fastest growing in EMEA. We are excited to provide MSE companies with appropriate solutions for low-end, midrange and high-end needs,” said Mike Styer, Country Manager, South Africa at NetApp. “NetApp does not only cover today's requirements for IT projects such as Windows consolidation and server and desktop virtualisation.”

All FAS2000 systems combine NetApp's unified storage architecture, add-on software packs for additional capabilities and system management functionalities.

The FAS2040 leverages NetApp's unified storage architecture and inherent storage efficiency features and provides customers with double the performance of any existing FAS2000 storage system and increased storage capacity of up to 30%. With up to 136TB, FAS2040 is ideal for handling workloads in Microsoft Windows consolidation and virtualised environments and offers the necessary connectivity for FC and IP SAN plus enhanced Ethernet and SAS port support. Furthermore, FAS2040 is ready for upgrading on Data ONTAP 8, the latest version of NetApp's OS. NetApp provides FAS2020 customers with an easy in-box upgrade path to the FAS2040.

Starting at EUR 6 400, the updated FAS2020 offers smaller, price conscious IT organizations with a simple, well integrated solution for enterprise class functionality at an unprecedented price. The FAS2020 now also features full multi-protocol support, including iSCSI, FC, CIFS and NFS, for added flexibility at no extra charge. The enhancements make the FAS2020 one of the industry's best values for the midsize enterprise market-and make simple and flexible unified storage a reality for a broader set of customers. Smaller IT organisations requiring unified storage as well as distributed enterprises looking for an affordable branch office solution will benefit from the FAS2020 system's low acquisition costs.

The FAS2050 as the family's high-end system offers large internal disk capacity and specialised I/O via PCLE expansion cards for 10GbE, FCOE and additional Fibre Channel/GbE ports. It comes pre-configured with two storage controllers in a larger 4U form factor. This enables the FAS2050 to offer a total of 20 internal drives for applications needing higher spindle counts or capacity. For example, customers can use this flexibility to optimise capacity for their home directories or the performance for Exchange. It is also the only FAS2000 system that integrates multipath I/O via dual port SAS cards. With these features, the high-end system FAS2050 is ideally suited for specialised deployments.

Customer pricing for the FAS2000 series starts at ZAR 75 000 and is subject to change without prior notice. All products are available immediately.

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