Network Appliance, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTAP) today announced its storage solutions will now support 4Gb Fibre Channel (FC). 4Gb FC combined with NetApp® unified storage systems and leading-edge data management software gives customers a compelling and powerful solution for managing large and ever growing amounts of data. NetApp 4Gb FC will allow its customers to increase the performance and availability of critical data and applications, while simplifying complex data management environments, improving productivity in application administration, and lowering storage costs.

NetApp SAN storage systems using 4Gb FC are ideally suited for customers that need to quickly develop, compute, transfer, or analyze large amounts of data, such as backup to disk, streaming video on demand, modeling and rendering, and large databases with extreme performance for faster time-to-solutions. The next-generation SAN technology gives customers the greater bandwidth performance they need, with no increase in price, and higher reliability due to a state-of-the-art interconnection technology that reduces the need for additional switch and host bus adapter ports.

“Given the growing and changing demand for data, customers require high-performance storage solutions to keep pace with their business needs,” said Rich Clifton, vice president and general manager of the Networked Storage business unit. “NetApp support for 4Gb FC SANs demonstrates the ongoing commitment we make to our customers to deliver powerful solutions that help them to gain more value from their data infrastructure.”

“NetApp is experiencing tremendous success with FC and they have an excellent SAN storage solution. It’s interesting that NetApp is one of the first leading storage vendors to support 4Gb FC. It shows a commitment on the part of NetApp to constantly improve its SAN offerings,” said Tony Asaro, senior analyst for the Enterprise Strategy Group.

Network Appliance provides comprehensive support for 4Gb FC SAN solutions for Solaris™ and in calendar Q2 2006 for Windows®, Linux®, AIX, HP-UX, VMware, and NetWare environments. In addition, NetApp sells or supports 4Gb HBAs from Emulex and Qlogic and 4Gb switches from Brocade, Cisco, and McData. The award-winning NetApp FAS3000 and NetApp V3000 support 4Gb FC SANs, and are backward compatible with 2Gb, providing existing customers with investment protection compared to competing solutions that require new system upgrades. For more information on NetApp unified storage solutions visit http://www.netapp.com/products/unified-storage.html.

Partner Support

“Data center managers and storage administrators know that they are getting a best-of-class solution when combining NetApp unified storage systems with the Brocade Silkworm family of 4Gb SAN switches,” said Tom Buiocchi, Vice President of Worldwide Marketing and Support for Brocade. “Together, Brocade and NetApp are leading the transition to 4Gb technology and are committed to helping customers reduce infrastructure costs and simplify the management and sharing of their storage resources.”

“As the demand for higher speed storage systems increases, Emulex 4 Gb/s Fibre Channel HBAs provide the same industry-leading performance and reliability that the world’s largest enterprises have come to trust and rely upon for their mission-critical applications,” said Mike Smith, executive vice president of worldwide marketing for Emulex. “Working closely with Network Appliance to provide robust next generation 4 Gb/s storage solutions ensures delivery of world-class SANs to our mutual customers.”

“Demanding storage applications such as backup and high definition television production crave the I/O bandwidth that only 4Gb Fibre Channel can deliver,” said Roger Klein, vice president of product marketing for QLogic’s Computer Systems Group. “Industry leaders like NetApp and QLogic are helping enterprises to optimize application performance and cost-effectively scale their networks without interrupting business operations.”