NetApp Bundles SAN, NAS Products

The new storage bundles are aimed squarely at users of Windows applications such as Exchange, SQL Server and Domino, said Rod Mathews, senior director of Windows marketing at NetApp. "There are a lot of [solution providers] doing applications and upgrades in the space," he said.

One of the major targets of NetApp's bundles are customers migrating to Microsoft Exchange 2003, Mathews said. "We want to offer a low-cost bundle to help solution providers upgrade customers from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2003," he said. "Customers will have to upgrade their servers for the application, and so it's a good time to move them from direct-attached storage to networked storage."

Amy Rao, CEO of Integrated Archive Systems, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based NetApp partner, speculated that NetApp's plans go even further than just grabbing a piece of the Windows applications storage space.

"They're really wanting to go after the low-end market where their prices were too high before," Rao said. "They want to go into the entry-level space and compete against Dell and EMC's Clariion."

NetApp is offering four basic bundles. An entry-level bundle based on the company's FAS250 iSCSI appliance with 500 Gbytes of capacity is priced at about $14,995. A midrange version with an FAS270 iSCSI appliance with 1 Tbyte has a price tag of about $29,995. For high availability, the FAS270C appliance with 1 Tbyte of capacity is priced at about $38,995 for iSCSI and $49,995 for Fibre Channel.

The bundles include SnapDrive software for storage virtualization, data snapshots and replication, and DataFabric Manager Lite for managing storage in a distributed environment.

Options include eight-port switches and dual host bus adapters for Fibre Channel use, and integration software for Exchange, SQL Server and Domino.