Network Appliance, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTAP) today announced support for iSCSI software boot-from-SAN capabilities from Microsoft and qualifies its iSCSI storage solutions with the new native iSCSI software stacks for Solaris™ 10 and Linux®. These capabilities increase the iSCSI market opportunity by providing robust highly available solutions for high-density server and departmental UNIX environments. Today’s announcements extend the NetApp lead in IP SAN, empowering customers with choice, flexibility, and risk reduction.

NetApp® IP SAN storage systems using iSCSI are ideally suited for customers that need to consolidate and better protect and manage data that is currently stored on direct-attached storage. In a direct-attached environment, data growth and server proliferation quickly lead to management nightmares as administrators struggle with backup and recovery, scalability, and provisioning issues. As the applications on direct-attached servers become more important to the business, the legacy storage environment is simply unable to meet the data availability requirements of the business. The situation is particularly severe in environments consisting of lots of smaller servers.

“Customers are showing enormous interest in using iSCSI storage for their high-density server and departmental UNIX environments. With native iSCSI host software and boot-from-SAN support more customers will be able to deploy iSCSI in these environments, just as native iSCSI support in Windows opened up more opportunity for iSCSI adoption,” said Rich Clifton, vice president and general manager of the Networked Storage business unit at NetApp. “Our increased support demonstrates the ongoing commitment to our customers in delivering powerful, affordable, and highly available IP SAN solutions that help them gain more value from their entire distributed data infrastructure.”

NetApp is working closely with server partners to ensure that complete end-to-end IP SAN solutions for Windows using Microsoft® iSCSI software boot-from-SAN capabilities are qualified under the Microsoft Windows catalog process. NetApp is also working with other host software vendors such as emBoot to provide similar capability for heterogeneous server environments.

In a separate initiative NetApp has qualified the iSCSI software initiator and the native MPxIO multipathing driver for Sun Microsystems’ Solaris 10. This will enable NetApp customers to get the benefits of affordable and highly available IP SAN solutions for their Sun™ server farms.

For more information on NetApp storage solutions, visit www.netapp.com/products/unified-storage.html.

About iSCSI Boot-from SAN

Storage consolidation, especially from direct attach storage environments to a SAN, has been an attractive proposition for data center managers, enabling them to centralize and maximize the utilization of their storage assets leaving the individual application servers with just a small amount of internal disk storage for the operating system boot disk and applications. In high-density server environments, however, the continued requirement for these internal disks leaves many individual points of management for the operating system code, which has to be patched and updated on a regular basis for every server.

Eliminating the boot disks from each server can greatly improve reliability and MTBF (mean time before failure) of each individual server by eliminating the most failure-prone component of the system. Storing the content of the boot disk along with the application code and data on the SAN and leveraging advanced data management techniques such as the NetApp FlexClone™ technology can result in massive reductions in the complexity and administrative overhead of applying operating system patches and application updates, and makes the provisioning of new servers extremely simple and virtually risk free. Up until now, iSCSI HBAs in each server have been required to enable iSCSI boot-from-SAN in a Windows environment. However, the vast majority of Windows iSCSI deployments use the iSCSI driver that comes free of charge with Windows and works with the built-in Gigabit Ethernet ports in the server.

The new Microsoft iSCSI software capabilities enable these customers to get the benefits of boot-from-SAN without the need for iSCSI HBAs. This is particularly attractive in high-density and blade server environments due to the economies of scale associated with not having to procure and configure an iSCSI HBA (or more) for each server or blade.