NETWORK APPLIANCE REDEFINES STORAGE LANDSCAPE WITH NEW BUSINESS CONTINUANCE SOLUTIONS.

Network Appliance, Inc. (Nasdaq:NTAP) has debuted new solutions that empower enterprises with higher levels of data availability and the industry's most robust storage recovery options. In a cost-conscious IT spending environment where even half an hour of downtime is equivalent to millions of dollars, Network Appliance solutions for business continuance are more important than ever.

New solutions announced recently include the NearStore product family that provides rapid recovery and backup consolidation at industry leading prices per megabyte for enterprises, as well as a new service level agreement that guarantees 99.99% uptime from NetApp filers.

As part of the company's expanding enterprise solutions suite, Network Appliance also introduced the new F87 and F810 filers, which offer customers the broadest price/performance choice for network-centric storage solutions, along with the ability to scale storage infrastructures as their business needs evolve.

"Information is the lifeblood of today's enterprise, regardless of size and geography," said Mark Santora, senior vice president of marketing at Network Appliance. "Storage solutions that address and protect the availability of data save companies money, especially when the costs of downtime and backup are so exorbitantly high."

Santora notes that Network Appliance pioneered a radical new approach to storage networks about 10 years ago with NAS solutions that have evolved into powerful IP SANs today. "Now we are revolutionizing rapid recovery and backup consolidation products combining massive new capacity with recovery speeds and services that deliver continuous business uptime for the most demanding enterprise applications and global data fabric architectures. With the power of new NetApp solutions, customers can harness the explosion of data in their businesses for maximum return and enhanced business success."

Network Appliance created its new solutions to satisfy the rigorous demands of today's 24x7 enterprise, which requires constant data uptime to address the realities of a global marketplace, the prevalence of online computing, and the explosion of data inherent in today's information economy. The solutions add a new element to global data fabric architectures that encompass massive amounts of data shared by employees, customers, and suppliers throughout the fabric and around the world. Depending on a customer's industry and application, just a half-hour of downtime can cost a company tens of millions of dollars in lost revenue and productivity. New Network Appliance business continuance solutions based on rapid recovery and consolidated backup help prevent such losses.

Central to this announcement is the NetApp NearStore product family, which Network Appliance describes as providing "ready-access data retention and retrieval." NearStore products are designed to serve a new market space for business information and continuance that has previously been too expensive to keep on disk. They complement traditional online storage (such as that provided by NetApp filers) that powers database, ERP, CRM, and DSS applications, as well as tape storage, which is the most widely used solution for data protection archival.

With NearStore, data recovery is the fastest possible because the NearStore family does not have the time limitations normally associated with restoring files -- instead it provides instant access to data enabling customers to restore or retrieve their data on-demand.

NetApp NearStore products are expected to begin shipping in the first half of calendar year 2002.