eWeek: NetApp Readies Upgrades for SAN Systems

“After a decade of criticizing the complexity and high price of
storage area networks, Network Appliance Inc. officials finally
shipped their own SAN products last fall–and promptly found out
that it’s not so easy.

“Now, less than a year later, several improvements are being
prepared, mostly for the same Fibre Channel market, said Rich
Clifton, vice president of NetApp’s SAN/iSAN business unit. The
upgrades include increased operating systems support, SAN-enabled
systems that use less rack space and management software
updates.

“All the Sunnyvale, Calif., company’s latest NAS
(network-attached storage) devices are SAN-enabled for Sun
Microsystems Inc.’s Solaris and Microsoft Corp.’s Windows. Linux is
being added for Fibre Channel, support for Novell Inc. is coming
for iSCSI and multiple other Unix flavors are also due this year,
Clifton said. ‘Most large customers have a broader portfolio of
enterprise servers in their infrastructure, so there’s a lot of
pressure on us,’ he said…”

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