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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Breaking News -
Storage:
Network Appliance Agrees To
Acquire Spinnaker Networks
Network Appliance Inc, a leading provider of enterprise storage solutions,
announced the signing of a definitive agreement to acquire Spinnaker Networks
Inc, a privately held company based in Pittsburgh, Penn., for approximately
$300 million in an all stock transaction. Spinnaker is a pioneer in scalable
system architectures, distributed file systems, next-generation clustering
technologies and virtualization. For Network Appliance, this is primarily a
software technology acquisition that reaffirms the NetApp business model and
extends NetApp leadership in scalability, simplicity and total cost of
ownership for enterprise storage systems. This acquisition accelerates the
delivery of the NetApp "Storage Grid" architecture enabling customers to
leverage even more value from their storage and data infrastructures. The
combination of Network Appliance and Spinnaker gives Network Appliance a
competitive, leadership position in bringing Storage Grid architectures to
market more quickly, and draws upon the technology prowess of each company to
offer superior storage solutions today.
Equally applicable to storage area network and network-attached storage
environments, Storage Grids are the ideal complement to the Grid computing
paradigm promoted by other technology industry leaders. Storage Grids offer
rapid and simple scalability of capacity, performance, availability, quality
of service and/or connection protocols on demand; a unified view and
management of all corporate data far surpassing today's limited virtualization
approaches; and optimized performance for remote data access in distributed
enterprises. The Storage Grid architecture will enable tighter application
integration with database and enterprise applications, provide superior data
protection, have the ability to more easily manage data resources based on
policies, and provide improved data security. The NetApp Storage Grid
architecture will offer these benefits leveraging commodity component costs
which dramatically lower customers' acquisition, expansion, and management
costs. In other words, the NetApp Storage Grid architecture is an ideal
platform for next-generation information lifecycle management.
Dan Warmenhoven, CEO of Network Appliance, said, "Today's business demands
fast, reliable, secure access to data and robust new approaches for
information lifecycle management. The combination of NetApp unified storage
and software solutions with advanced distributed systems architectures from
Spinnaker further accelerates the shift to networked storage and speeds our
ability to deliver powerful new Storage Grids as the foundation for data
infrastructures of the future. Data-intensive enterprises benefit from higher
performance, more flexibility and scalability, increased infrastructure
reliability, and much tighter integration with database and layered
applications."
Ron Bianchini, president, CEO and co-founder of Spinnaker, continued, "The
combination of Network Appliance and Spinnaker enables us to more quickly
deliver what our customers are asking for -- flexible data infrastructure that
offers high performance, massive and simple scalability, and tremendous data
availability and security. Network Appliance's leadership position in
networked storage, history of innovation, global sales and support
capabilities, cultural fit with Spinnaker, and financial health are very
compelling for us to bring our technologies and products to more customers,
helping them maximize their current data infrastructure returns while
preparing for an exciting Storage Grid future."
Steve Duplessie, principal analyst at Enterprise Storage Group, added,
"Spinnaker is a leader in next-generation storage architecture. With this
technology, Network Appliance is clearly extending its offerings in high-end
storage solutions, and with its ability to unify SAN by adding Fibre Channel
and iSCSI, this has the potential to be a great move for NetApp. You just
gotta love a market leader that continues to aggressively pursue technology
innovations. This will enhance the NetApp competitive position and time to
market with the next new advance. I can't find a single thing I don't like
about this deal."
"Through the first three quarters of this year, Spinnaker has shipped more
than 75 SpinServer systems worldwide to a broad range of customers in all of
the company's major targeted verticals. New customers include Acxiom, a data
management services company; Industrial Light & Magic, a Lucasfilm Ltd.
company serving the digital needs of the entertainment industry for visual
effects and animation; Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), the United States
Department of Energy's largest science and energy laboratory; and the Salk
Institute for Biological Studies with laboratories focused on the overarching
areas of neurosciences, molecular biology, genetics, and plant biology,"
continued Warmenhoven. "The addition of NetApp to the mix only strengthens the
value equation of unified storage plus advanced distributed systems
capabilities yielding massive returns in performance, reliability and
scalability."
"We recognized the value of Spinnaker's advanced distributed file system
architecture when the firm first invested in the company in 2000," said Promod
Haque, managing partner at Norwest Venture Partners and lead investor in
Spinnaker Networks. "Today, the enterprise storage market is highly innovative
and competitive, and an important area of IT investment for leading
corporations worldwide."
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