NetApp Named Partner of the Year

NetApp Named Microsoft 2009 Storage Solutions Partner of the Year

AUCKLAND, New Zealand – 25 June, 2009 – NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) today announced that it has been named the Microsoft 2009 Partner of the Year, in the Advanced Infrastructure, Storage Solutions category. NetApp was chosen out of an international field of top Microsoft partners for delivering market-leading customer solutions for Microsoft® Hyper-V™ environments. This award, chosen by a panel of Microsoft judges, reflects NetApp’s long-standing partnership with Microsoft and its commitment to and success helping Microsoft customers do more with less in Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint® Server, SQL Server®, and Hyper-V environments.

NetApp was chosen as Solutions Partner of the Year based on its partnership with Microsoft and complete solutions that help reduce customers’ costs, maximise storage efficiency, and improve availability in virtual environments. With NetApp, Microsoft customers can reduce the amount of storage they need by at least 50% when they also use NetApp® technologies such as thin provisioning and deduplication. Earlier this year NetApp announced a unique storage efficiency program that guarantees that customers running Hyper-V environments will use 50% less storage with NetApp compared to traditional storage*. The NetApp guarantee can help minimise investment costs and risks while enabling customers to achieve greater storage utilisation in their virtual server and desktop environments.

NetApp utilises a variety of Windows® Server platform technologies to improve storage system management and streamline backup, recovery, and remote replication in Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V environments. In addition, tight integration with the Microsoft System Centre family of products and additional application-integrated NetApp products help maximise uptime for a wide variety of application environments, including Microsoft Exchange Server, SQL Server, and SharePoint Server. Since NetApp storage solutions are tightly integrated with Microsoft’s technologies, customers are backed by NetApp’s global customer support infrastructure, which integrates Microsoft Premier Support.

By combining the ability to take snapshots of a running virtual machine via Hyper-V with NetApp's unique approach to Snapshot™ copy backups, NetApp also enables automated, consistent, space-efficient backup creation in a matter of seconds. Not only can customers back up their environments more frequently and meet existing or shrinking backup windows, with NetApp they can store more backup copies and recover data twice as fast as with other solutions in virtualised environments. Effective and efficient backup and recovery also complement Microsoft business continuity features and help customers implement more complete disaster recovery schemes while keeping costs under control.

“We are very excited about working with NetApp to deliver innovative end-to-end solutions to our joint customers,” said Kim Akers, general manager, Global Partner Team, at Microsoft. “The combination of our technology with NetApp’s storage solutions gives our customers the tools they need to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and drive their businesses forward.”

“We are pleased to honour NetApp as our Advanced Infrastructure Storage Solutions Partner of the Year,” said Ross Brown, vice president, Solution Partners and ISVs, Worldwide Partner Group, Microsoft Corp. “By pairing its solutions with Microsoft’s Hyper-V, NetApp is helping enterprise customers leverage the power of virtualized environments to dramatically reduce costs and increase availability so they can get the most out of their IT infrastructure.”

“Being chosen as Microsoft’s Storage Partner of the Year is a great honour for NetApp,” said Jay Kidd, chief marketing officer at NetApp. “While this award establishes NetApp as the leading storage solutions provider for Microsoft virtualisation customers, more than anything it underlines the customer success our partnership and close collaboration has delivered.”

For more information about Microsoft’s Partner of the Year Awards, visit www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/wwpc/default.mspx.

For more information about NetApp and Microsoft‘s Global Alliance Partnership, visit www.netapp.com/us/solutions/solution-partners/global-alliance/microsoft-partnership.html.

For more information about NetApp’s 50% guarantee, visit www.netapp.com/guarantee, where you can access program details including FAQs, technical resources, best practices, and the new NetApp Storage Efficiency Calculator to evaluate your current environment and learn how NetApp storage-efficiency technologies can lead to higher storage utilisation.

Discuss this news in the NetApp Community, where you can exchange thoughts and ideas on a variety of topics with our community members. Collaborate with our company, engage in conversation with NetApp leaders and employees, our customers, and partners. Participate in our passion to go further, faster. Join now at www.netapp.com/us/communities.

About NetApp
NetApp creates innovative storage and data management solutions that accelerate business breakthroughs and deliver outstanding cost efficiency. Discover NetApp’s passion for helping companies around the world go further, faster at www.netapp.com.

To learn more about the history and culture of NetApp, get a copy of How to Castrate a Bull by NetApp founder Dave Hitz at www.howtocastrateabull.com.

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NetApp, the NetApp logo, Go further, faster, and Snapshot are trademarks or registered trademarks of NetApp, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Microsoft, SharePoint, Windows, and SQL Server are registered trademarks and Hyper-V is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation. All other brands or products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders and should be treated as such.

*This guarantee and related Program are limited to the terms set forth in www.netapp.com/guarantee applicable only to prospective orders placed after the Program effective date and are dependent upon your compliance with the terms and conditions set forth in this document and any of the instruction sets and specifications set forth in the referenced documents. NetApp’s sole and exclusive liability and your sole and exclusive remedy associated with the terms of this guarantee and related Program is the provision by NetApp of the additional storage capacity as set forth in this guarantee and related Program.

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