NetApp's Backup Plan: Page 4 of 4

The new push into backup won’t turn the company around single-handedly (see NetApp Takes a Nap) but it is clearly indicative of its desire to find new areas of growth, says Yankee’s Gruener.

“It’s a very aggressive time for all the vendors,” he says. “NetApp is a market leader in the NAS space, and they’re neck and neck with EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) in terms of trying to control that market in the long term.”

NetApp also announced other new products and services:

• The NetApp F87 workgroup filer, available with up to 576 gigabytes of raw storage. The F87 is designed to be rolled in and installed in less than five minutes, Santora says.
• The NetApp F810 and F810c, entry-level Fibre Channel filers with storage capacities of 1.5TB for a single head.
• NetApp Availability Assurance, a service-level agreement that guarantees 99.99 percent uptime for customers who buy NetApp’s System Availability Management service. The SLA is initially available for NetApp F840c and F880c systems.
• NetApp ProTech Expert, an expanded support offering that provides an on-call engineer from one of NetApp’s four support centers to resolve service issues.

— Todd Spangler, special to Byte and Switch
http://www.byteandswitch.com