NetApp, Microsoft ink three-year pact

NEW YORK, USA: NetApp and Microsoft Corp. announced a new three-year agreement that deepens product collaboration and technical integration, and extends joint sales and marketing activities to customers worldwide.

Under the new agreement, the two companies will collaborate and deliver technology solutions that span virtualization, private cloud computing, and storage and data management.

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Bob Kelly, corporate vice president, infrastructure server marketing, Server and Tools Business, Microsoft, said: "Microsoft is committed to driving highly scalable dynamic datacenter solutions with innovative partners like NetApp. Through the deeper integration of server, virtualization, management and storage technologies, Microsoft and NetApp customers can expect data centre solutions that help them reduce costs, increase performance and reach new levels of efficiency."

Tom Georgens, president and CEO, NetApp, said: "The NetApp and Microsoft alliance has helped thousands of enterprise customers around the world do more with less. We are excited about the opportunity we have to build on this success and together help our mutual customers design and implement truly dynamic data centres that can dramatically reduce costs and increase availability, flexibility, and ease of use."

As part of the new strategic alliance agreement, NetApp and Microsoft will expand product collaboration and technical integration activities, including the following areas:

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Virtualized infrastructure solutions based on Windows Server 2008 R2, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, Microsoft System Center and NetApp storage systems.

Storage and data management solutions for Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, and Microsoft SQL Server.