The acquiring of Spinnaker enables Network Appliance to bring Storage Grid architectures to market quickly. Storage Grids offer rapid and simple scalability of capacity, performance, availability, quality of service, and/or connection protocols on demand; a unified view and management of all corporate data surpassing the virtualization approaches; and optimized performance for remote data access in distributed enterprises.

The Storage Grid architecture enables tighter application integration with database and enterprise applications, ease management of data resources based on policies, and provide data protection and security. The NetApp Storage Grid architecture plans to leverage commodity component costs to lower the total costs of information lifecycle management (ILM).

Dan Warmenhoven, CEO of Network Appliance, said, "Today's business demands fast, reliable, secure access to data and robust new approaches for information lifecycle management. The combination of NetApp unified storage and software solutions with advanced distributed systems architectures from Spinnaker further accelerates the shift to networked storage and speeds our ability to deliver powerful new Storage Grids as the foundation for data infrastructures of the future. Data-intensive enterprises benefit from higher performance, more flexibility and scalability, increased infrastructure reliability, and much tighter integration with database and layered applications."

Ron Bianchini, president, CEO, and co-founder of Spinnaker, continued, "The combination of Network Appliance and Spinnaker enables us to more quickly deliver what our customers are asking for-flexible data infrastructure that offers high performance, massive and simple scalability, and tremendous data availability and security. Network Appliance's leadership position in networked storage, history of innovation, global sales and support capabilities, cultural fit with Spinnaker, and financial health are very compelling for us to bring our technologies and products to more customers, helping them maximize their current data infrastructure returns while preparing for an exciting Storage Grid future."

Steve Duplessie, principal analyst at Enterprise Storage Group, added, "Spinnaker is a leader in next-generation storage architecture. With this technology, Network Appliance is clearly extending its offerings in high-end storage solutions, and with its ability to unify SAN by adding Fibre Channel and iSCSI, this has the potential to be a great move for NetApp. You just gotta love a market leader that continues to aggressively pursue technology innovations. This will enhance the NetApp competitive position and time to market with the next new advance. I can't find a single thing I don't like about this deal."

"Through the first three quarters of this year, Spinnaker has shipped more than 75 SpinServer systems worldwide to a broad range of customers in all of the company's major targeted verticals. New customers include Acxiom, a data management services company; Industrial Light & Magic, a Lucasfilm Ltd. company serving the digital needs of the entertainment industry for visual effects and animation; Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), the United States Department of Energy's largest science and energy laboratory; and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies with laboratories focused on the overarching areas of neurosciences, molecular biology, genetics, and plant biology," continued Warmenhoven. "The addition of NetApp to the mix only strengthens the value equation of unified storage plus advanced distributed systems capabilities yielding massive returns in performance, reliability, and scalability."

"We recognized the value of Spinnaker's advanced distributed file system architecture when the firm first invested in the company in 2000," said Promod Haque, managing partner at Norwest Venture Partners and lead investor in Spinnaker Networks. "Today the enterprise storage market is highly innovative and competitive, and an important area of IT investment for leading corporations worldwide."