NetApp unveils new storage solutions

Bangalore, Sep 11 (UNI) Eyeing the fast growing market for data storage appliances in mid-size enterprise (MSE) space, NetApp today unveiled two new products designed to simplify data management and maximise existing IT investments.

Briefing newspersons here on the new products, NetApp Managing Director Soumitra Agarwal said MSEs external disk storage market was expected to grow to six billion US Dollar by 2011 at a compounded annual growth rate of 10.9 per cent.

MSEs faced a dilemma over management and protection of all data without a corresponding increase in headcount.

''Our new products will solve this dilemma once for all as deployment and auditing services are designed to simplify data management and maximise existing IT investments.

''Unlike the products of our competitors, the investment made by the MSEs will stay as it is easy to maximise existing investments,'' he said.

The Indian market for the product was estimated at 35 million US Dollar a year with the number of users of such storage system estimated at one lakh.

The price starts from Rs ten lakh for an entry level product in the 2020 range, he said.

The Mr Agarwal said NetApp brought to the market an enterprise-class storage technology that easily scales to help customers maximise their data infrastructure and minimise complexity.

The MSEs with an employee strength of 100 to 1,000 managed multiple servers and supported data storage needs of the employees.

The new NetApp products would help these companies to tighten integration between major applications and storage platform as well as reduce overall costs by fully optimising IT assets, he claimed.

NetApp Country Manager, India and SAARC, George Thomas said the Sunnyvale, California-based company, had a 20 per cent market share in enterprise level storage products and the Indian facility of the 2.8 billion USD company had a head count of 600.

UNI