NetApp Customers Implement Deduplication Technology on Over 37,000 Systems Worldwide

Cohasset Associates Finds NetApp Deduplication Meets SEC Compliance Rules

Sunnyvale, CA, May 13, 2009 -- NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) today announced that customers continue to adopt deduplication at a rapid pace. With NetApp’s unique deduplication technology, customers are able to eliminate duplicate data across all tiers of storage, allowing them to combat data proliferation while creating a more efficient storage infrastructure. Through April of this year, 7,200 NetApp customers activated deduplication on over 37,000 systems, representing an astounding 514 petabytes in usable storage capacity.

NetApp also announced that Cohasset Associates, Inc. conducted an assessment of NetApp® deduplication and SnapLock® Compliance Volume technology and found that it meets the electronic storage requirements of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) under rule 17a-4(f). Under this rule, companies must retain electronic records in a nonrewritable and nonerasable format for a certain period of time. Cohasset determined that NetApp deduplication technology, which works on primary and secondary storage at the block level, meets SEC requirements. This allows customers to apply NetApp deduplication technology to their electronic records as they would to any other data and enjoy the same gains in storage efficiency.

“NetApp deduplication, in conjunction with SnapLock, meets SEC compliance standards because it retains all metadata associated with the data it deduplicates," said Bob Williams, president of Cohasset Associates, Inc. “Another important factor is that NetApp performs byte-level validation before any deduplication of data occurs.”

In addition to NetApp's complete family of FAS systems, the power of its deduplication technology is also available on NetApp V-Series virtualized storage systems and Virtual Tape Library (VTL) systems. As a result, NetApp deduplication can be applied to storage systems manufactured by EMC, HP, Hitachi Data Systems, and others, providing customers with the industry’s only end-to-end deduplication solution, spanning primary, backup, and archival storage applications.

“With budgets constricted across IT organizations, NetApp continues to offer the most compelling deduplication solutions to help our customers increase storage efficiency and save time and money,” said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Solutions Marketing, NetApp. “Our customers have responded with rapid adoption that has topped even our own expectations. Now, with this evaluation from Cohasset, customers have even more reasons to implement deduplication today and reduce their storage footprint.”

NetApp deduplication strengthens NetApp's portfolio of space-saving technologies, which include thin provisioning, Snapshot™ copies, and flexible clones. Like most of these space-saving technologies, NetApp deduplication is a feature that comes at no extra cost. NetApp is the only major storage and data management vendor to embed deduplication technology in all of its unified storage systems.

To read the Cohasset Associates report on NetApp deduplication and SnapLock technologies applied to SEC compliance data, visit media.netapp.com/documents/ar-netapp-snaplock-compliance.pdf.

To view a unique perspective on deduplication insights and developments, visit the “Ask Dr Dedupe” blog at blogs.netapp.com/drdedupe/.

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Source: NetApp