Network Appliance

Network Appliance is able to hold its own against the bigger storage giants like EMC and Hitachi Data Systems.

Over the last few years, NetApp has grown from a company that primarily sold network-attached storage (NAS) filers to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), to one that has created a new class of storage appliances called Fabric Attached Storage (FAS) and sells storage management software.

Last year, the US$1.5 billion company set a new direction to woo large enterprises, and partnered vendors like Oracle, SAP, and Veritas. It collaborated with Oracle to help customers using Oracle Enterprise Grid Computing Software and NetApp's storage solutions for Oracle 10g, to develop and manage enterprise grid computing architectures.

In April, the storage player entered an agreement with IBM where the latter would re-brand and sell NetApp's NAS, information life-cycle management products and associated software.

The first fruit of the agreement was borne in August when IBM unveiled its TotalStorage N3700, a rebranded NetApp FAS270 array that supports file-level data transfers or block-level transfers via the iSCSI protocol.

To augment its storage offerings, NetApp acquired storage security vendor Decru in June for US$275 million.

According to Gartner's latest Asia-Pacific report on the external disk storage market, NetApp posted another quarter of strong growth in the region. The storage company recorded revenue of US$17.92 million for a 4.8 percent share.