SAS Selects Network Appliance as the Storage Infrastructure for SAS IntelliVisor for Financial Services

Leading Business Intelligence Provider Chooses NetApp(R) Solutions to Power Financial Services ASP Offering

SEATTLE, WA, March 31, 2003 -- Network Appliance, Inc. (Nasdaq:NTAP), a leading provider of enterprise network storage solutions, today announced that the leading business intelligence provider, SAS, chose NetApp as its storage solution provider to power SAS(R) IntelliVisor(SM) for Financial Services, an application service provider (ASP) offering. SAS has deployed multiple terabytes of Network Appliance(TM) storage including the NetApp FAS900 series unified storage systems and NetApp nearline backup and rapid restore solutions that include NearStore(TM) devices and SnapMirror(R) software.

The NetApp storage solutions will enable SAS to rapidly store and access the vast amounts of data needed for SAS IntelliVisor for Financial Services, including web logs, reports, email, home directories, and graphic-intensive software development information. Additionally, the simplified architecture of these solutions will provide the application with maximum operational efficiency, lowering total cost of ownership and increasing uptime.

"By consolidating disparate database information and ensuring accuracy, business intelligence software can be a very powerful tool," said Richard Roach, senior director of SAS' ASP Marketing. "Our decision to support and deploy NetApp storage solutions as the storage platform for one of our ASP offerings allows SAS to share common storage, personnel, and processes across the application resulting in lower cost and higher availability."

"The storage infrastructure for SAS applications must be highly available, plug seamlessly into heterogeneous environments, and be simple to scale and manage," said Phil Williams, vice president of marketing at Network Appliance. "The NetApp unified storage solutions address the three most significant challenges that IT organizations face today: storage consolidation, data center operations, and business continuance."

For information on how NetApp solutions are utilized within SAS environments visit www.netapp.com/solutions/partners/sas.html.

About Network Appliance

Network Appliance is a world leader in unified storage solutions for today's data-intensive enterprise. Since its inception in 1992, Network Appliance has delivered technology, product and partner firsts that continue to drive the evolution of storage. Information about Network Appliance solutions and services is available at www.netapp.com.

NetApp and SnapMirror are registered trademarks and Network Appliance, NearStore, and The evolution of storage are trademarks of Network Appliance, Inc., in the U.S. and other countries. SAS and all other SAS Institute Inc. product or service names are registered trademarks or trademarks of SAS Institute Inc. in the USA and other countries. All other brands or products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders and should be treated as such.

Contacts

 
 
    
 Network Appliance, Inc.
Jaime Le, 408/822-3287
jle@netapp.com
or
Voce Communications
Katryn McGaughey, 650/322-7933
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High-Performance Storage Infrastructure for SAS® Environments

Solution

Effective business decisions are based on the ability to efficiently process and store information. SAS software offers a wide range of information delivery software technologies to facilitate this process. Partnered with Network Appliance™ storage solutions, SAS software offers an unprecedented solution for large and complex application environments. Network Appliance enterprise-class storage infrastructure simplifies the management of large amounts of data, increases availability, promotes data sharing, enhances performance, and delivers a reduced total cost of ownership (TCO). The combined solution from NetApp and SAS helps organizations optimize decision support systems by centralizing and consolidating data to reduce complexity, thereby augmenting application effectiveness for even the largest volumes of data.

Benefits

The solution from NetApp and SAS provides SAS users benefits in three key areas: manageability, performance, and TCO.

Manageability—Network Appliance hardware and software are designed for simplicity and manageability. Through innovative design, Network Appliance avoids many time-consuming management tasks altogether and required management functions can be performed using one set of integrated tools. For example, adding a terabyte of storage can take as little as 15 minutes.

Performance—In SAS environments, due to the large amounts of data being manipulated, performance is highly dependent on two resources: computational capability and I/O subsystem performance. NetApp® storage solutions improve performance by offloading the I/O functions to a dedicated storage device, which is tuned to deliver data as fast as possible.

TCO—The complexities of enterprise SAS environments coupled with massive growth of data lead to an expensive infrastructure, with storage as the centerpiece. As storage spending becomes more strategic for IT organizations, it is critical for enterprises to select the right storage solution that builds on previous storage investments seamlessly and scales effectively. Because of its unsurpassed scalability, flexibility, and ease of use, Network Appliance has storage solutions that have been rated at 75% lower TCO than other competing solutions, as reported by INPUT*, a leading market research firm.

Problems Solved

Network Appliance storage solutions directly address three major challenges that IT organizations implementing SAS solutions currently face: storage consolidation, data center operations, and business continuance.

Storage consolidation—Consolidating storage allows SAS users to share access to a common pool of data stored on Network Appliance servers. This is becoming increasingly common as organizations consolidate storage to reduce the complexity that resulted from a large number of servers, each with its own substantial storage pool. Consolidating storage has two major advantages: it enables data sharing for SAS data sets across users and lowers cost by providing a more standard storage infrastructure.

Data center operations—Effective management of a SAS environment necessitates streamlined backup and recovery of data. Whether downtime is planned or unplanned, resources need to be optimized for minimum disruption of operations. Network Appliance clustered storage solutions deliver availability of 99.996%**, as measured across the AutoSupport installed base. In addition, integrated software technology is built into its storage to do instant backups of large amounts of data.

Business continuance—As businesses continue to expand their online presences and evolve toward 24 x 7, global operations, ensuring continuous availability of critical data has become increasingly important. Traditional solutions for business continuance have been plagued by slow recovery times, while lack of integration between different solutions decreases flexibility and increases management complexity. Network Appliance offers a full range of integrated business continuance solutions that feature extremely rapid recovery times to ensure that critical data is always available. These solutions integrate seamlessly with each other and with Network Appliance storage hardware to simplify operations and ensure maximum utility.

Product Descriptions

Network Appliance Servers

NetApp servers are a robust, field-proven, highly available storage solution for consolidating data and simplifying data management. All storage appliance models work in the combined solution from Network Appliance and SAS.

Network Appliance NearStore™ NearStore products are high-capacity nearline storage systems that provide the same data management features as the storage appliances and are best used for reference, archive, or backup data.

Network Appliance Data Availability and Protection Software

NetApp software technology, including the Snapshot™ technology that is part of the Data ONTAP™ operating system, provides a range of extended data management and security functions, including rapid recovery, extended and centralized backup, and remote data mirroring.

Clustered Failover safeguards against hardware failures by automatic filer takeover and ensures high data availability for business-critical environments by eliminating any single point of failure through a fully redundant, active/active network storage cluster configuration.

SAS Software

SAS offers comprehensive solutions designed to address business challenges across key facets of the enterprise, software that targets and solves industry-specific problems, and an integrated suite of modular products designed to meet a range of focused information needs. The functionality of SAS products is built around the four data-driven tasks that are crucial to every successful business intelligence application—data access, data management, data analysis, and data presentation.

About Network Appliance

A recognized leader in enterprise storage and the delivery of data and content on demand, NetApp storage solutions ensure that customers get information where it's needed, when it's needed. Network Appliance has more than 35,000 systems installed worldwide, and the company's distribution channel spans over 70 countries around the globe. For more information, visit www.netapp.com or call (800) 443-4537.

About SAS

SAS is the largest privately held software company in the world. SAS is the world leader in business-intelligence software and services, enabling customers to turn raw data into usable knowledge. SAS serves more than 39,000 business, government, and university sites in 117 countries. Ninety percent of the overall Fortune 500 are SAS customers. For more information, visit www.sas.com or call (800) 727-0025.

* Source: INPUT, Database Storage Solutions, Total Cost of Ownership Analysis for Database Storage Solutions, December 2001. ** Network Appliance data based on quarterly statistics generated by AutoSupport customer reports on more than 20,000 users.

DS-2436 Rev. 2/03 http://www.netapp.com/solutions/partners/sas.html