Network Appliance, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTAP) unveiled two new midrange storage systems today—the NetApp® FAS3020 and FAS3050—plus a new serial ATA (SATA) option for primary storage applications. Concurrently, NetApp debuted two new V-Series virtualization engines—the NetApp V3020 and V3050. These new solutions, combined with Data ONTAP^TM 7G software, address three significant customer pain points—high storage acquisition costs, low storage resource utilization, and increasing storage management costs—with elegant, powerful, and scalable solutions that help today’s enterprise tailor its storage needs to its business and data demands. The new systems also significantly increase NetApp midrange performance.

“We designed our new FAS systems, virtualization engines, and SATA disk option to provide the best value of any midrange storage system in the industry,” said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Products and Partners at Network Appliance. “Our customers tell us that data storage consumes 30% to 50% of their IT infrastructure budgets, and that data growth presents a huge management challenge. We listened and designed the modular and scalable FAS3000 series and the V3000 systems to reduce overall complexity, increase performance, and simplify data management. Additionally, we are achieving an industry milestone by enabling economical, high-density SATA disk drives for primary storage applications—without sacrificing data integrity and safety.”

The FAS3000 series delivers up to twice the price/performance and supports more users per system than previous generation FAS storage systems for greater storage consolidation capability. As part of the unified NetApp architecture, these midrange systems support file services, FC SAN, IP SAN, and multiple network configurations, while offering scalability to higher performance systems with seamless, painless upgrades without requiring the “forklift” data migration needed by most other offerings currently on the market. Designed with enterprise serviceability, continuous availability, and easy manageability in mind, the NetApp FAS3000 series increases reliability, simplifies maintenance, and reduces storage infrastructure complexity. With storage capacity up to 84TB and 336 disks, the FAS3000 series brings high-end capabilities with a midrange price tag.

“The new NetApp FAS3000 series will give customers like Jefferson-Pilot Financial the best options to architect a highly available solution that simplifies the data management of our primary business applications,” said John Kelly, vice president at Jefferson Pilot Financial. “Like most financial services companies experiencing rapid storage growth, we need to consolidate storage, maximize data protection, and streamline backup/archiving in order to get more value from our IT investments. These new midrange products squarely position NetApp for further success in the enterprise.”

Additionally, FAS3000 systems offer the FlexVol? capabilities built into Data ONTAP 7G, which improves disk performance even for small data volumes. FlexVol technology can also increase customers’ storage utilization by up to 50%. Combined with the new SATA storage option, primary storage cost per megabyte (MB) can be reduced by more than half. Only NetApp can offer this level of breakthrough storage cost savings. NetApp is leading the industry in featuring SATA drives as an option for primary storage and is the only company to safeguard those drives against disk failure with RAID-DP^TM technology. RAID-DP offers better data protection and far lower cost per MB than competing vendors’ conventional disk mirroring (RAID-1) approaches to protection. Initial target applications for SATA-based primary storage include non-transactional data warehouses, home directories, software development, and disaster recovery systems.

The V3020 and V3050 improve performance by up to two times that of previous generation V-Series systems and improve scalability with four times the capacity and integrated host and storage connectivity. Additionally, the systems allow better manageability with remote power control and call home capability. V-Series systems enable customers to extend the complete suite of groundbreaking dynamic virtualization capabilities delivered in NetApp Data ONTAP 7G software to third-party storage products from HDS, HP, IBM, and Sun. The unique virtualization capabilities of V-Series systems translate directly into customer cost savings and a more intelligent, fluid approach to storage asset utilization that accommodates shifting business demands. In short, the V-Series family offers what NetApp calls “the most comprehensive and sophisticated virtualization engine available.”

NetApp also announced the availability of a new, independent study from VeriTest, a division of Lionbridge (Nasdaq: LIOX), that compared the usability and performance of the FAS3020 storage system to the EMC CLARiiON CX500 mid-range RAID array. VeriTest analyzed how NetApp unified storage, leveraging FlexVol technology, simplifies the deployment and management of SAN storage environments to provide higher performance than can be obtained using conventional RAID array products.

The study used configurations that resemble workloads encountered in typical on-line database environments. VeriTest’s key findings include:

• NetApp performs better
  NetApp—configured with RAID-DP—generated up to five times better performance compared to EMC when using RAID1/0 with both systems connected via Fibre Channel. When the same test was run using iSCSI on NetApp, the performance advantage was up to three times better than EMC via Fibre Channel.
  
  Using the snapshot process with EMC resulted in a sustained 60% drop in overall performance. There was no sustained degradation in the overall performance of NetApp storage as a result of using NetApp Snapshot? technology.
• NetApp maximizes deployed storage resources
  NetApp FlexVol technology required 26 fewer physical disk drives than EMC to provision a sample enterprise-class database system.
• NetApp is easier to deploy and administer
  NetApp required significantly less time than EMC to complete various key provisioning and administrative tasks.

As Patrick Rogers continued, “Reports we have seen from META Group show that more than 70% of data center storage requirements can be addressed by modular, midrange storage—which is exactly how we designed and built the FAS3020 and FAS3050 systems. Similar reports have shown that overall storage needs are growing at 45% annually with midrange storage growing at 50% to 55% per year. With that kind of storage demand, customers expect their storage suppliers to offer them novel ways to control costs, reduce IT burdens, and deliver incremental value. Today’s announcements, and the significant impact of the VeriTest results, emphasize our efforts to do just that.”

NetApp solutions are complemented by industry-leading ConsultingEdge and SupportEdge services available from NetApp Global Services (NGS). By combining exceptional storage expertise, applying best practices, and providing ongoing global support and maintenance, NGS can help customers design, implement, and support unified storage solutions using the new FAS3000 series, V3000 systems, the SATA drive option, and new features in Data ONTAP 7G to lower storage acquisition costs, increase storage utilization, and decrease storage management costs.