Network Appliance, Planet Online and Freeserve Partner to Deliver Free Online Service to 700,000 New Users.

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 7, 1999--

$2.6 Million Dollar Sale of Network Appliance(TM) Products

Provides Faster Web Access for New Freeserve Service

Network Appliance, Inc. (Nasdaq:NTAP), the leading provider of dedicated data-access appliances, today announced that Internet Service Provider (ISP) Planet Online, part of Energis Telecommunications, has signed a $2.6 million deal to deploy Network Appliance's NetCache(TM) and filer products, as the foundation of the Freeserve free Internet access service.

All Freeserve accounts will rely on Network Appliance's high performance, scalable servers for Web caching, email, news and Web storage. As part of the partnership agreement, Network Appliance (NetApp) will supply over 4.3 terabytes of storage to Planet Online.

Freeserve, launched in September 1998, already has over 500,000 accounts, making it UK's fastest growing ISP. Freeserve has grown 10 times faster than any UK ISP, with over 8,000 new accounts opened daily. Over 40 percent of Freeserve's customers are new to the Internet, logging on for the first time with Freeserve. Freeserve estimates that this represents a 10 percent increase in the number of people online in the UK.

NetApp's philosophy is to design specialized servers, called appliances, which are dedicated to particular storage tasks, thus optimizing performance, ease of deployment and manageability. NetCache appliances dramatically speed Web access, increase performance under serious loads and reduce bandwidth costs by storing popular Web sites on dedicated servers closer to end users.

The filer product is optimized exclusively for network data access and retrieval, and therefore provides industry-leading performance, reliability and ease-of-management for UNIX(TM) and Windows NT(TM) environments as well as the Internet.

"Freeserve is a ground breaking service that is bringing millions of people onto the Web for the first time," said Ian Rhodes, technical manager, Planet Online.

"With the extraordinary response to the service, it was vital that we invest in scalable, manageable and deployable technology. NetApp(R) filers and NetCache appliances enable us to meet the phenomenal growth in our subscriber base while at the same time continuing to deliver high performance and quality services that customers expect."

When Freeserve customers access the Web, their calls are routed through the Energis network to Planet's NetCache appliances, which store local copies of tens of thousands of popular Web sites.

When their users access a Web site, a local copy is stored in the cache, therefore providing much higher performance delivery of the content to other users that access the particular site (as access to locally cached content is much faster than fetching original content over the Internet).

In addition to NetApp's caching appliances, all Freeserve users access their email, newsgroups and Web home pages via high performance NetApp filers. Planet Online is using NetApp's C760 and C630 NetCache appliances along with its F760 and F630 filers -- providing over 4.3 terabytes of total storage.

"Planet Online chose NetApp for its mission-critical criteria such as deployabity, reliability and ease of use. In addition, NetApp understands that international ISPs have critical performance constraints that must be resolved while reducing the high bandwidth costs," said Steve Ronksley, NetApp's UK managing director. "Partnering with Planet on Freeserve is the ideal relationship in creating quality of service for the European Internet community."

About Freeserve

Freeserve was launched on 22nd September 1998 by the Dixons Group plc. It is now the UK's fastest growing Internet Service Provider. Freeserve is available on a free CD in all Dixons, Currys, PC World and The Link stores in the UK and is primarily intended for home users and small office/home office business users. Eleven weeks after its launch, Freeserve had over 500,000 accounts.

About Network Appliance

Network Appliance, a veteran in network file serving and caching, has been providing data access solutions for over six years. Major corporations and ISPs, including Lycos, Yahoo, Citicorp Securities, Siemens, Lockheed, Cisco, Motorola and Texas Instruments have deployed NetApp solutions.

NetApp's Internet caching solutions (NetCache) and file servers ("filers") deliver fast, simple, reliable and cost-effective access to network-stored data and enable simultaneous shared file services for UNIX(TM), Windows(R) and the World Wide Web.

The company pioneered the concept of the "network appliance," an extension of the industry trend toward dedicated, specialized products that perform a single function. Network Appliance filers and NetCache appliances are based on the company's innovative data access software known as Data ONTAP and standards-compliant hardware. More information is available at http://www.netapp.com.

Note to Editors: NetApp is a registered trademark and Network Appliance, Data ONTAP and NetCache are trademarks of Network Appliance, Inc. All other brands or products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders and should be treated as such.