Network Appliance acquires Topio

Network Appliance, Inc today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Topio, a privately held Santa Clara, California-based company with R&D in Haifa, Israel, for approximately $160 million in an all-cash transaction.

Topio, a NetApp Strategic Partner (http://www.netapp.com/news/press/news_rel_20060815) is highly regarded for its innovative software that helps customers replicate, recover and protect data over any distance regardless of the underlying server or storage infrastructure.

The combination of Topio software and NetApp proven data management solutions will enable enterprises to safely, reliably, and non-disruptively replicate their production data on any vendor system - including EMC, HP, or HDS - to any NetApp storage system.

The joint capabilities of Topio and NetApp deliver a broad range of solutions spanning data protection, data migration and data cloning. In addition to providing customers with all the benefits that come with the renowned unified architecture (http://www.netapp.com/products/unified-storage.html) from NetApp, the joint solution is especially compelling in two user scenarios.

First, customers with production storage not from NetApp can non-disruptively replicate data to a NetApp system and take full advantage of rapid, storage-free data cloning using NetApp FlexClone (http://www.netapp.com/products/software/flexclone.html) technology, which provides near-instantaneous creation of multiple clones of data without additional storage requirements. Second, customers with mixed legacy storage environments can unify their disaster recovery (DR) environment on reliable and cost-effective NetApp tiered storage platforms and put the DR copy to active business use.

Jay Kidd, senior vice-president and general manager, Emerging Products group, Network Appliance, said: "The average enterprise creates and stores anywhere between 10 and 20 copies of its data, including testing and application development data, which can increase the amount of storage consumed by 10 to 20 times. This is both expensive and time-consuming. With the addition of Topio, enterprises using legacy storage systems can create working data copies in seconds while dramatically decreasing overall storage requirements. This not only provides immediate cost savings, but also allows companies to accelerate their application test and development to bring their products to market much more quickly."

The heterogeneous capabilities of Topio Software also enable users to consolidate all of their DR data onto a single, reliable and scalable NetApp platform and use this DR copy for such business applications as testing and reporting. This empowers customers to implement a simplified, tiered DR infrastructure for greater operational efficiencies and lower total cost of ownership. Customers can now extend DR protection to more of their enterprise data using less of their IT budgets.

For Network Appliance, the acquisition continues to expand the NetApp heterogeneous data protection portfolio. Topio adds heterogeneous DR capabilities to existing heterogeneous disk-to-disk backup solutions from NetApp, which include NearStore VTL (http://www.netapp.com/products/nearstore/nearstore-vtl.html) for heterogeneous data centre backup, Open Systems SnapVault (http://www.netapp.com/products/software/ossv.html) for remote office backup, and SnapVault for NetBackup (http://www.netapp.com/solutions/data_protection-br.html) a solution jointly engineered with Symantec and highly optimised for NetBackup in any storage environment.

Topio will also help enable NetApp to build on its momentum of increasing footprint in the data centre with Fibre Channel SAN by helping accelerate migration of customers using legacy storage systems onto NetApp SAN storage systems.

The acquisition is expected to close in December 2006, subject to customary closing conditions. Topio will be a new business unit within NetApp, and its research and development team will continue to operate in Haifa, Israel. Topio is committed to maintaining and furthering its deep relationships with global enterprise customers.