Features - Storage Innovations:

NETWORK APPLIANCE DEBUTS MIDRANGE UNIFIED STORAGE MODELS

Network Appliance Inc announced new additions to its unified storage platform: the FAS920 and FAS920c. The FAS920 is based on the proven FAS900 series architecture and replaces the F825 storage system, completing the transition of all NetApp filers to unified storage systems.

The FAS920 system is designed to provide affordable enterprise-class performance, reliability, and advanced data management features for midrange applications. The FAS920 helps businesses with those applications consolidate multiple storage units, decrease system overhead, and increase performance for background activities while ultimately reducing the storage management burden and lowering the total cost of ownership for storage. The FAS920c is the clustered version of the FAS920.

"The FAS920 and FAS920c are strong additions to our broadening unified storage portfolio," said Patrick Rogers, vice president of marketing at Network Appliance. "Both products establish a new benchmark for midrange enterprise storage systems, with price/performance, reliability, scalability and, of course, hallmark NetApp simplicity that no other competitor can offer. Our customers have already deployed these new systems in a variety of areas, including database and layered applications, technical computing, and large workgroup environments, and have commented on the products' ease of use, performance and advanced data management features."

The balance of capacity and performance with flexible I/O configuration enables the NetApp FAS920 to power a broad range of applications in NAS and SAN configurations simultaneously. Currently deployed in large service-provider networks and data-intensive environments, including those running database/ERP and other enterprise applications, the FAS920 is a proven price-performance workhorse scaling to 12TB in a clustered configuration. These midrange systems are targeted at Exchange, home directories, large storage consolidation and database environments.

The FAS920 has already achieved inclusion on the Windows Server catalog for Microsoft, and the product has been well received among customers running Microsoft enterprise applications. The FAS920 supports Fibre Channel SAN, iSCSI SAN and NAS environments.