In a move that extends its leadership in the industry, NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) today announced the availability of the EF540 all-flash array for today's extreme performance-driven enterprise applications, and previewed the architecture of its new, purpose-built FlashRay™ product family, which will deliver rich scale-out and storage efficiency features to maximize the benefits of all-flash arrays. The new product introductions extend the comprehensive NetApp® enterprise flash portfolio, which maximizes the value of flash across the entire compute, network and storage stack, enabling the flexibility to choose the best approach to unique workloads.

With the strongest and broadest flash portfolio in the industry, in a complete line of products, including intelligent caching technologies Flash Cache™, Flash Pool™, and Flash Accel™, the new EF540 flash array and the forthcoming FlashRay family provide flexibility and choice and maximize the value of flash across the entire compute, network, and storage stack. NetApp has deployed more than 36PB of flash in the market to date. These new product introductions will further extend that leadership.

"Flash changes everything by transforming the speed of business," said Manish Goel, executive vice president, Product Operations, NetApp. "However, enterprise imperatives for global scale, efficiency, and reliability remain the same. NetApp's approach to flash removes the compromise from consideration, offering customers the best of all worlds."



Watch Brendon Howe, vice president, Product and Solutions Marketing, talk about NetApp's comprehensive flash storage strategy and how customers can take advantage of it.

NetApp EF540 Flash Array Heads to the Top of the Enterprise-Class

The EF540, built on the proven SANtricity® operating system, is the industry's first flash array to combine consistent extreme performance with enterprise-class high availability, reliability, manageability, and worldwide support. Designed for performance-driven applications, the EF540 delivers over 300,000 IOPS and submillisecond data access in a highly available, fault-tolerant architecture. It can eliminate storage over-provisioning and dramatically reduces costs by cutting space utilization, power, and cooling. Business-critical database applications can run up to 500% faster than in traditional storage environments, delivering instant response times and enterprise-class reliability.

The EF540 features intuitive storage management and advanced tuning functions, enabling efficient management with minimal effort. The storage system maximizes application value and has a fully redundant architecture designed to eliminate downtime.

NetApp FlashRay Family Defines the Future of Flash Storage

With the introduction of the FlashRay family, NetApp is extending its storage and data management leadership by developing a new, purpose-built all-flash storage architecture. The FlashRay™ product architecture is founded on rich scale-out and efficiency capabilities to maximize the benefits of flash arrays. The new product line will combine consistent, low-latency performance, high availability, and integrated data protection with enterprise storage efficiency features such as inline deduplication and compression.

FlashRay will be available in limited beta in the middle of 2013 and will be generally available in 2014. The product line is designed from the ground up to maximize the value of flash. FlashRay continues to execute against a strategy to deliver an intelligent and integrated architecture that is optimized for flash.

Today, NetApp also announced the release of three new platforms within its FAS6200 storage systems family. The FAS6220, FAS6250, and FAS6290 increase the performance and value of its high-end product line for the most stringent workloads.

Availability



The NetApp EF540 flash array is available today. The FlashRay product line will be generally available early in 2014.

Supporting Quotes:

Industry Analyst Quote

Jeff Janukowicz, research director, Solid State Storage and Enabling Technologies, IDC

"A new class of arrays is unlocking flash's full potential and delivering capabilities that accelerate the performance, reliability, and efficiency of enterprise data centers. For all-flash arrays to gain broader market adoption, it is important to look beyond the performance improvements and deliver must-have reliability, availability, and supportability features. The continued growth of NetApp flash storage systems, underscores the value of the company's approach to managing and storing the massive amounts of data being created today."



Customer Quotes

Kirk Larson, Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Children's Hospital Central California

"NetApp's all-flash array offering would help us improve the user-experience for high-performance workloads. Currently, we are experiencing 25% annual data growth using NetApp's Virtual Storage Tier; this combines NetApp efficiency technologies with Flash Cache intelligent caching to prioritize I/O data requests. Hospital staff members can access the right data at the right time, while IT can deliver a more dynamic and cost-effective infrastructure."

Bradley Lauritson, Director of Upstream Technology, Apache Corporation

"The NetApp storage solution—in particular, their flash solutions—means we can take full advantage of our new software environment for enhanced decision making, unhampered by data transfer delays. Apache can make more accurate and profitable drilling decisions with the NetApp storage as our IT foundation."

NetApp Alliance Technology Partners

Eron Kelly, General Manager, Server and Tools, Microsoft Corporation

"SQL Server 2012 gives customers the database platform and BI capabilities they need to further close the gap between queries and insight. Flash optimized solutions such as NetApp's product can accelerate data access performance without compromising enterprise reliability, and can add speed to queries in the most demanding environments."

Mike Clayville, Vice President, Product Marketing, Cloud Infrastructure, VMware

"NetApp has a history of delivering integrated and innovative solutions with VMware virtualization and cloud technologies that help advance the IT objectives of our mutual customers. With the expansion of NetApp's Flash Technology offerings from host-side Flash Accel to the introduction of the FlashRay, we are enabling our joint customers to accelerate the performance of the most demanding business-critical applications virtualized with VMware infrastructure."

Strategic Server Cache Technology Partner

In August 2012, NetApp began a strategic relationship with Fusion-io in which the Fusion-io ioMemory platform products and two server caching software products: ioTurbine™ for virtualized environments and directCache™ for non-virtualized environment are integrated with the data management capabilities of ONTAP and resold through NetApp.

Rich Boberg, General Manager of Caching Solutions and Executive Vice President, Fusion-io

"Enabling enterprises to accelerate the applications that drive business decisions is an IT imperative and priority for both Fusion-io and NetApp. Our shared commitment to excellence in application acceleration led to our unique relationship, as Fusion-io products are the only partner solutions available from NetApp and its resellers. NetApp's extended portfolio of flash products, coupled with Fusion ioMemory hardware and server caching software, enables customers to maximize performance and application response times across their entire datacenter."

Server Cache Technology Alliance Program Members

NetApp has expanded its Alliance Partner Program to embrace third party hardware and software server-caching solutions. Current members include LSI, SanDisk Enterprise Storage Solutions, and STEC, all are undergoing testing to validate their server-caching solutions with NetApp.

Gary Smerdon, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Accelerated Solutions Division, LSI Corporation

"Enterprise-class flash storage solutions are key to eliminating system bottlenecks and deliver application acceleration and responsiveness required by organizations today. As a leader in server storage solutions, LSI is pleased to extend our engagements with NetApp around our complementary portfolios of flash-based solutions, such as the qualification of NetApp's Flash Accel software with LSI's Nytro™ WarpDrive® server-side flash cards, that provide efficient and reliable storage options for organizations seeking to accelerate business critical applications while reducing total cost of ownership."

Steve Fingerhut, Vice President, Enterprise Storage Solutions Marketing, SanDisk Enterprise Storage Solutions

"The mainstream adoption of flash in the enterprise continues as its capacities and feature set grow. SanDisk, with our Enterprise SSD and caching software portfolio, is happy to continue our partnership with NetApp and their full portfolio of solutions that help customers maximize the value of flash across the entire compute, network, and storage stack."

Ali Zadeh, Corporate Senior Vice President, Chief Marketing Officer and General Manager, STEC, Inc.

"STEC and NetApp are committed to delivering intelligent, efficient, high-performance hardware and software solutions to the enterprise-storage market. Both our companies have a history of proven performance leadership supporting the world's most demanding and complex computing and networking environments. STEC looks forward to our continuing work with NetApp in helping a broad range of organizations fully leverage their growing solid-state storage deployments to accelerate applications and amplify their IT infrastructure investments."

NetApp Distributors and Resellers

Michael Flügge, Solution Director Consulting Services, Computacenter

"NetApp once again delivers true storage innovation: Their new, flash-powered enterprise storage solutions significantly improve the performance of data infrastructures while retaining NetApp's market-leading functionalities for data protection and availability. This has very tangible effects for customers, especially in the channel and service provider field. Looking at our portfolio, we can not only deliver existing services better and exert tighter control over our service levels. Solutions like All Flash Array and FlashRay truly shine when it comes to designing new business offerings and accelerating their go-to-market. To us, NetApp flash solutions are a very important growth investment."

John Woodall, Vice President, Engineering, Integrated Archive Systems

"NetApp is the choice our customers make when they need storage with no compromise. Together, IAS and NetApp are able to provide our clients with a blend of extreme performance and enterprise-class reliability and protection; not ever having to trade among these requirements. Customers can have it all. NetApp's announcement of the All Flash Array and preview of FlashRay helps organizations realize the performance, efficiency, and reliability they need to achieve real-time results, yield efficiencies in their IT organization and increase business agility. I only expect NetApp to gain share and continue to provide industry-leading innovation, products, and the best storage value available to our customers."

Bob Olwig, Vice President, Business Strategy, WWT

"WWT is leveraging cutting-edge technologies like Enterprise Flash storage to accelerate application performance and lower costs for enterprises harnessing cloud computing, virtualization, and big data. As a longstanding NetApp Star Partner, we have always worked closely with NetApp to deliver solutions that are simpler, more manageable, and faster to deploy than traditional Enterprise Storage products. NetApp's recent Enterprise Flash announcements demonstrate their storage and data management leadership and provide us with a new set of products to help our customers meet their business goals and mission needs."

Additional Resources

About NetApp

NetApp creates innovative storage and data management solutions that deliver outstanding cost efficiency and accelerate business breakthroughs. Our commitment to living our core values and consistently being recognized as a great place to work around the world are fundamental to our long-term growth and success, as well as the success of our pathway partners and customers. Use of the word "partner" or "partnership" does not imply a legal partnership between NetApp and any other company. Discover our passion for helping companies around the world go further, faster at www.netapp.com.

Press Contact:

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NetApp PR

408-822-7291

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