NetApp, SAP Help Consol Energy

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Network Appliance (NASDAQ: NTAP - News) today announced that CONSOL Energy, a multienergy producer of coal, gas and electricity, deployed a NetApp Fibre Channel SAN (storage area network) solution in a SAP® applications environment to manage, protect, back up, and recover the data generated by its coal mining complexes. The NetApp Global Services team helped CONSOL Energy decrease the time required to execute its SAP application upgrade project while increasing the accuracy of the application migration. Together, NetApp and SAP enabled CONSOL Energy to achieve significant cost savings and enhance protection of its data in SAP applications by empowering the company with the ability to recover data in a matter of minutes -- a 75% reduction in data recovery time.

CONSOL Energy selected the NetApp Fibre Channel SAN storage solution to reduce its data storage costs, better manage its explosive data growth, minimize its backup and recovery windows, simplify and minimize its SAP applications upgrade process, and reduce system administration overhead. The NetApp Fibre Channel SAN solution includes NetApp Data ONTAP® software with FlexClone® for creating instantaneous copies for test and development, FlexVol® for storage virtualization and thin provisioning, and Snapshot(TM) technology for near-continuous data protection. The NetApp FC SAN solution helps CONSOL Energy protect its data storage environment against double disk failure, maximize its storage utilization, achieve storage provisioning on the fly, and significantly reduce upgrade and testing time.

"CONSOL Energy required a solution that allowed it to easily scale, better manage the excess storage capacity across its SAN, and let its storage and backup administrators easily recover data that was backed up onto disk," said Dave Larson, director, Computer Operations at CONSOL Energy. "The NetApp FC SAN solution helps us achieve every one of these needs and takes the complexity out of data management, all at a significant cost savings."

Network Appliance Inc.