Network Appliance, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTAP), today announced another iSCSI milestone— 2,000 production deployments of NetApp IP SAN (storage area network) systems. NetApp IP SAN solutions enable enterprises to easily consolidate storage, maximize data availability, and implement nondisruptive backups with instant data recovery.

Salix Pharmaceuticals, Ltd. develops and markets prescription pharmaceutical products for the treatment of gastrointestinal diseases. Salix chose to leverage the benefits of a NetApp IP SAN solution to manage the rapid growth of its Microsoft® Windows® business-critical applications, increase data availability, and reduce total cost of ownership. Integration with NetApp SnapDrive^TM and NetApp Snapshot^TM software helps the company simplify storage management and virtualize its storage infrastructure.

“iSCSI is IP-based, which makes it easier for network managers to understand, deploy, and manage in their existing infrastructure and for a broad range of applications,” said Jeff Chapman, network manager for Salix Pharmaceuticals. “NetApp iSCSI helps us deliver a complete IT storage solution today and gives me the best option for scaling our storage infrastructure to meet the business needs of Salix and our customers in the future.”

Bacardi U.S.A., Inc., the U.S. import sales and marketing arm of one of the world’s leading wine and spirits producers, also recognized the benefits of IP SAN and deployed a NetApp iSCSI solution to address the growing storage requirements of its Oracle? data warehouse applications. With the NetApp solution installed, Bacardi U.S.A, Inc., is able to better allocate its IT administration resources and optimize the performance of its business intelligence tools.

“NetApp iSCSI technology has helped Bacardi U.S.A, Inc., scale our Oracle environment and simplify our storage needs,” said Doug Watson, vice president, Information Technology at Bacardi U.S.A, Inc. “We can leverage the same management tools across all our Oracle data warehouse applications on a single NetApp infrastructure, which improves our uptime and reliability. iSCSI makes it simple and painless for us to grow and at a reasonable cost.”

"NetApp was the first major storage vendor that understood the compelling value proposition of iSCSI and committed themselves to bringing solutions to customers," said Tony Asaro a senior analyst for the Enterprise Strategy Group. "iSCSI over Ethernet is a viable alternative to FC as a SAN interconnect that reduces cost and complexity. And the proof of this is the 2,000 real-world iSCSI SANs that customers have implemented using NetApp products. iSCSI is changing the economics of storage networking and NetApp is leading the way."

“The iSCSI market is booming for us, as increasing numbers of companies seek simple, affordable, administrator-friendly SAN solutions for their Windows applications,” said Patrick Rogers, vice president, Products and Partners at Network Appliance. “We are delighted to add Salix Pharmaceuticals and Bacardi U.S.A. to the 2,000 customers who have deployed NetApp IP SAN solutions to support this class of applications in production environments.”

According to the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker Q4 2004, NetApp remained the leader in the iSCSI storage market, with a 43% revenue share for CY2004. Additionally, NetApp is the leader in the IP storage market (NAS and iSCSI), posting a 37.3% market share in CY2004.

NetApp IP SAN solutions are available today for Microsoft Windows, Linux®, Novell NetWare^TM, Sun^TM Solaris^TM, IBM AIX, and HP/UX environments. Software iSCSI initiators from the leading OS vendors are supported, as well as iSCSI HBAs from Adaptec and Qlogic and iSCSI TOE cards from Alacritech. iSCSI is supported by the NetApp F800, FAS200, FAS900, V-Series, and NearStore® storage systems. In addition, an iSCSI protocol license is available at no charge from the NetApp NOW^TM Web site for existing customers with software subscription contracts.