NetApp to make storage simple and more cost-effective

Sunnyvale, California-based storage solutions company Network App-liance (NetApp)

reinforced its goal of making storage simple and more cost-effective. Add-ressing

an analyst conference in New York, NetApp CEO Dan Warmenhoven emphasized the

company's growth strategy which is built around anticipat-ing customer needs,

innova-tion, partnership with industry leaders, world-class support services and

investment in people, processes and systems.

Warmenhoven stressed that these would be the key to NetApp's growth.

"We inspire to be the fastest growing company in storage," he added.

Among other things that he emphasized was NetApp's strategy of providing

unified infrastructure for storage that would facilitate better econo-mies of

scale. "This is what cus-tomers are looking for," Warmenhoven said and

added that unification will fuel growth.

He also said that virtualiza-tion would be another key com-ponent of NetApp's

strategy. "The goal of virtualization at NetApp is to solve multiple

problems with the same storage infrastructure and drive utilization up and

management costs down," he emphasized.

Storage is perhaps the most complex as also the most dynamic component of the

IT infrastructure of any growing organization today. Without doubt storage has

come to signify much more than the literal sense of the term. CIO's can't

have a good night's sleep just by storing and backing up data safely

somewhere. They must also ensure that the data is always managed in a way that

makes them available all the time without any disruption to whoever their users

are, whether inside or outside the organization. At every growing business

organization data is growing at a hitherto unimagi-nable pace and is also

acquiring new dimensions.

Against this backdrop, orga-nizations face the challenging task of planning

and deploying a storage system that takes care of current requirement,

simpli-fies management, provides them with the capability to scale up at will

and also conti-nuously achieve cost-effective-ness. They also need a storage

system that not just integrates well with their core business strategy but also

keeps pace with changes in the business. Unfortunately, not many sto-rage

systems can ensure this.

Network Appliance appears to realize all this well and that is the reason why

it is working on to eliminate some of the key problems-low capacity

utili-zation, lack of transparency, slow processing time-that most storage

systems face today. Eliminating islands of storage that makes manage-ability

difficult is also one of the key goals of the company.

(CyberMedia News) The author traveled to New York at the invitation of

Network Appliance


Ravi Shekhar Pandey


New York