NetApp
| Company type | Public (NASDAQ: NTAP) |
|---|---|
| Industry | Data storage devices |
| Founded | 1992 |
| Headquarters | Sunnyvale, California |
Key people | Dan Warmenhoven, CEO Tom Mendoza, President Steve Gomo, CFO David Hitz, Executive Vice President (EVP) & Founder Steve Kleiman, Senior Vice President (SVP) & CTO James Lau, EVP, Founder, and Chief Strategy Officer Tom Georgens, EVP & General Manager (GM), Enterprise Storage Systems Jay Kidd, SVP & GM, Emerging Products Group |
| Products | FAS6000, FAS900, FAS3000, FAS200, NearStore, NearStore VTL, Decru DataFort, Information Server, V-Series, NetCache, StoreVault |
| Revenue |  $2.07 billion USD (FY 2006) |
Number of employees | 5840 |
| Website | www.netapp.com |
Network Appliance, Inc. Nasdaq: NTAP is a network storage and data management company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. It is a member of the NASDAQ-100 and ranks on the Fortune 1000. The company employs about 5000 people worldwide.
Network Appliance is credited with the widespread adoption of Network Attached Storage or "NAS" and pioneered Unified Storage. Now Network Appliance storage products support a variety of storage protocols such as iSCSI SAN, Fibre Channel SAN, CIFS and NFS. The key technologies behind most of Network Appliance's product line are the Data ONTAP storage operating system and WAFL file system.
Competition
In December, 2005, IDC ranked Network Appliance, fourth among vendors of storage software with 6.9% market share, ahead of Hewlett-Packard, and behind EMC Corporation, Symantec, and IBM. In the same month, IDC ranked Network Appliance second among vendors Network Attached Storage with 35.1% market share, behind EMC, and first among vendors of iSCSI SAN vendors with 35.1% market share ahead of EMC and Hewlett-Packard.
History
Network Appliance was founded in 1992 by David Hitz, James Lau, and Michael Malcolm. At the time, its major competitor was Auspex. It had its initial public offering in 1995. Like many high technology companies, Network Appliance thrived in the internet bubble years of the mid 1990s to 2001, during which the company grew to $1 billion in annual revenue. After the bubble burst, Network Appliance's revenues quickly declined to $800 million in its fiscal year 2002. Since then, the company's revenues have steadily climbed, reaching $2.07 billion in its fiscal year 2006.
Software
The operating system for most of Network Appliance's products is Data ONTAP. The distinguishing feature in ONTAP is its WAFL file system, and WAFL's data protection capabilities, including snapshots, file system mirroring, and RAID-DP.
Major Acquisitions
- 1997 - Internet Middleware
- 2004 - Spinnaker Networks, Inc. The technolgy Spinnaker brought to NetApp was integrated into Data ONTAP GX and first released in 2006.
- 2005 - Alacritus
- 2005 - Decru. Decru continues to operate as a separate business.
Major Divestitures
- 2006 - Netcache product sold to Blue Coat Systems, Inc.
Divisions
According to NetApp's biographies of its two general managers, NetApp is divided into two major businesses:
- Enterprise Storage Systems includes the FAS and NearStore systems products.
- Emerging Products Groups includes:
- Alacritus
- Decru
- StoreVault. Announced in May of 2006, this group brings enterprise-level networked computer storage to small and medium sized businesses. StoreVault offers the Data ONTAP operating environment through a simplified user Windows-based interface, designed for 50-500 person shops with a single IT manager and up to about 6TB of data.
- V-Series