IBM Team with Network Appliance for Virtualization and Blade Solutions

IBM (www.ibm.com) and Network Appliance (www.netapp.com) announced their intention to extend their strong relationship to encompass the growing technologies of virtualization and blade solutions.

NetApp also announced today that it plans to join IBM as one of nine founding members in the new Blade.org industry community. The community was conceived to enhance the relationships between the founding members and to serve as a catalyst for the industry to create new blade technology. NetApp is already providing back-end storage systems for IBM eServer® BladeCenter(TM).

"IBM is pleased to enhance its already strong relationship with NetApp to extend virtualization solutions across key customer segments," said Rich Lechner, vice president, TotalStorage Solutions at IBM.

"Together, IBM and NetApp will be better positioned to provide clients with proven enterprise-scale virtualization solutions based on open standards, allowing customers to leverage their existing IT investments."

"Customers today need to simplify their infrastructures and reduce complexities," said Patrick Rogers, vice president of partners and products at Network Appliance. "Virtualization and capabilities such as thin provisioning in our V-Series are key enablers to help companies reduce costs. Network Appliance is pleased to extend its relationship with IBM on this front."

Storage virtualization can help simplify infrastructures by managing the complexities of the underlying storage environments and dramatically reduce costs associated with IT management by enabling the creation of a single virtual pool of information across the enterprise.

IBM TotalStorage SAN Volume Controller is designed to increase the flexibility of storage infrastructures by enabling changes to the physical storage with minimal or no disruptions to applications.

The NetApp V-Series and storage systems brings the rich suite of Data ONTAP(TM) software including Snap and Flex technology for data management, data protection and disaster recovery to a virtualized pool of storage across multiple vendor arrays.