Network Appliance, Inc. (Nasdaq:NTAP), significantly broadened its enterprise storage solutions portfolio with today's unveiling of new entry-level systems, expanded operating system support for Fibre Channel SAN (storage area network) environments, new enhancements for meeting SnapLock Compliance, and the introduction of SnapLock Enterprise. These solutions enable customers to create a flexible storage infrastructure that addresses a variety of data and storage needs for today's information-intensive business.

These new systems and software further extend the Network Appliance unified storage portfolio for application data in mission--and business-critical environments to archive and reference purposes, and for enterprise-wide or workgroup and departmental requirements. Network Appliance is focused on solving enterprise customer storage challenges including regulatory and compliance data needs, storage consolidation, Internet access and security, technical applications, and data protection. Today's announcements highlight these areas and provide customers with new options to meet their diverse storage infrastructure requirements.

As Mark Santora, senior vice president of Marketing at Network Appliance, noted, "Business today requires fast, reliable access to data to power a wide range of enterprise applications, from compute-intensive database applications for enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management to collaborative, messaging, and engineering workgroup applications. IT departments are faced with a huge storage need in every part of their organizations, especially with the government's increased legislative requirements for reference and regulated data within financial services, healthcare, and other industries. Network Appliance is the only vendor today to offer a full line of unified storage solutions for online, nearline, and distributed data requirements based on a single-platform, which improves the overall customer experience and lowers their total ownership cost."