| ISMagazine.com | Internet Today |
March, 2000 |
netdrive.com
Selects Network Appliance as Back-End Storage Infrastructure Partner to Meet Explosive
Growth of New Internet ServiceStrategic Partnership Leverages Both Companies' Strengths to Provide the Premier Personal Storage on the Internet - and Scale to Meet Demand
LOS GATOS, Calif., Feb. 14 -- netdrive.com, the company that is transforming the Internet into a personal storage medium, today announced it has chosen Network Appliance, Inc. (Nasdaq: NTAP) as their strategic partner to furnish its ``back-end'' storage infrastructure. Network Appliance(TM), a leading provider of network-attached storage solutions, will serve a key role in providing secure and extremely reliable access to netdrive users who store their documents, photos and music files on the Internet. By utilizing Network Appliance family of data access, management and storage products, netdrive has a robust platform that can be rapidly scaled to meet the explosive growth of this premier service.
Both companies also announced plans to launch a co-marketing campaign to build awareness of their mutual offerings.
``The response to our service has been just phenomenal. Since launching in January, our service has exploded to thousands of new users joining daily,'' said Marc Munford, vice president of Business Development, netdrive. ``To deliver the best personal, Internet-based storage service we need the best storage infrastructure, one that is always up and easily expandable. This is why we chose Network Appliance to be the drive behind the drive.''
The relationship leverages each company's core strengths: netdrive's innovative client software and file transfer technology, and Network Appliances' advanced network storage and data management systems and software. The combination provides a seamless, high performance solution to end users that is secure, fault-tolerant, with 24x7 availability. By utilizing Network Appliancemarket-proven products and technology, netdrive can expand existing capacity and functionality and add new data centers to meet growing demand without any service interruption.
``NetApp® is committed to delivering critical storage infrastructure solutions to today's hot Internet storage companies like netdrive.com. We look forward to helping them achieve their goal of giving Web users worldwide, a free 'Internet hard drive,'' said Larry Kubo, vice president, marketing Network Appliance. ``We are pleased that netdrive has standardized on Network Appliance technology to deliver rock-solid storage reliability to its customers worldwide.''
About netdrive's service
Netdrive is a free service that offers 100MB of secure personal storage on an 'Internet hard drive' that is as easy to use and functions the same way as a PC hard drive, allowing users anytime, anywhere access to their files.
netdrive provides a fast, secure and free way to store and share documents, photos, music and HTML files. This allows users to access important information at home, work and on the road without hassling with floppies and large e-mail attachments. netdrive.com does this by creating a personal Internet drive that fits right into the Windows environment; it looks and acts just like another PC hard drive. Users can save files to their own netdrive within applications and move or copy files with drag-and-drop simplicity, just as they do now with PC and network hard drives.
About Network Appliance
Network Appliance, a veteran in network file serving and caching, has been providing data access solutions since 1992. Major corporations and ISPs, including Cisco, Citicorp Securities, Lockheed, Lycos, Motorola, Siemens Texas Instruments and Yahoo! have deployed Network Appliance solutions. Network Appliance's Internet caching solutions (NetCache(TM) appliances) and file servers (``filers'') deliver fast, simple, reliable and cost-effective access to network-stored data and enable simultaneous shared files services for UNIX®, Windows NT® and the World Wide Web.