Network Appliance

From Free net encyclopedia

Template:Infobox Company Network Appliance, Inc. Template:Nasdaq, founded in 1992 by David Hitz, James Lau, and Michael Malcolm, is a network storage company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. It is a member of the NASDAQ 100 and employs more than 4800 people worldwide.

Network Appliance is credited with the widespread adoption of Network Attached Storage or "NAS". Now Network Appliance storage products support a variety of storage protocols such as iSCSI, CIFS, NFS, and FCP. The key technology behind most of Network Appliance's product line is the WAFL file system.

1 Competition
2 History
3 Software
4 Major Acquisitions
5 External links

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Competition

When Network Appliance was founded, its major competitor was Auspex.

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, 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.

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History

The company was founded in 1992. 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 $1.6 billion in its fiscal year 2005. As of February 14, 2006, according to Yahoo Finance, outside financial analysts were forecasting that Network Appliance would reach $2 billion in annual sales its fiscal year 2006.

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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.

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