Give them free-access, bundled service (premium-charge) and they will come. Well its along the same lines anyway. <g>
Network Appliance, Planet Online and Freeserve Partner to Deliver Free Online Service to 700,000 New Users
SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)
$2.6 Million Dollar Sale of Network
Appliance(TM) Products
Provides Faster Web Access for New
Freeserve Service
Network Appliance, Inc.
(Nasdaq:NTAP), the leading provider of
dedicated data-access appliances,
today announced that Internet Service
Provider (ISP) Planet Online, part of
Energis Telecommunications, has signed
a $2.6 million deal to deploy Network
Appliance's NetCache(TM) and filer
products, as the foundation of the
Freeserve free Internet access service.
All Freeserve accounts will rely on
Network Appliance's high performance,
scalable servers for Web caching,
email, news and Web storage. As part
of the partnership agreement, Network
Appliance (NetApp) will supply over 4.3
terabytes of storage to Planet Online.
Freeserve, launched in September
1998, already has over 500,000
accounts, making it UK's fastest
growing ISP. Freeserve has grown 10
times faster than any UK ISP, with over
8,000 new accounts opened daily. Over
40 percent of Freeserve's customers
are new to the Internet, logging on for
the first time with Freeserve. Freeserve
estimates that this represents a 10
percent increase in the number of
people online in the UK.
NetApp's philosophy is to design
specialized servers, called appliances,
which are dedicated to particular
storage tasks, thus optimizing
performance, ease of deployment and
manageability. NetCache appliances
dramatically speed Web access,
increase performance under serious
loads and reduce bandwidth costs by
storing popular Web sites on dedicated
servers closer to end users.
The filer product is optimized
exclusively for network data access
and retrieval, and therefore provides
industry-leading performance, reliability
and ease-of-management for UNIX(TM)
and Windows NT(TM) environments as
well as the Internet.
"Freeserve is a ground breaking service
that is bringing millions of people onto
the Web for the first time," said Ian
Rhodes, technical manager, Planet
Online.
"With the extraordinary response to the
service, it was vital that we invest in
scalable, manageable and deployable
technology. NetApp(R) filers and
NetCache appliances enable us to meet
the phenomenal growth in our
subscriber base while at the same time
continuing to deliver high performance
and quality services that customers
expect."
When Freeserve customers access the
Web, their calls are routed through the
Energis network to Planet's NetCache
appliances, which store local copies of
tens of thousands of popular Web sites.
When their users access a Web site, a
local copy is stored in the cache,
therefore providing much higher
performance delivery of the content to
other users that access the particular
site (as access to locally cached
content is much faster than fetching
original content over the Internet).
In addition to NetApp's caching
appliances, all Freeserve users access
their email, newsgroups and Web home
pages via high performance NetApp
filers. Planet Online is using NetApp's
C760 and C630 NetCache appliances
along with its F760 and F630 filers --
providing over 4.3 terabytes of total
storage.
"Planet Online chose NetApp for its
mission-critical criteria such as
deployabity, reliability and ease of use.
In addition, NetApp understands that
international ISPs have critical
performance constraints that must be
resolved while reducing the high
bandwidth costs," said Steve Ronksley,
NetApp's UK managing director.
"Partnering with Planet on Freeserve is
the ideal relationship in creating quality
of service for the European Internet
community."
About Freeserve
Freeserve was launched on 22nd
September 1998 by the Dixons Group
plc. It is now the UK's fastest growing
Internet Service Provider. Freeserve is
available on a free CD in all Dixons,
Currys, PC World and The Link stores in
the UK and is primarily intended for
home users and small office/home office
business users. Eleven weeks after its
launch, Freeserve had over 500,000
accounts.
About Network Appliance
Network Appliance, a veteran in
network file serving and caching, has
been providing data access solutions
for over six years. Major corporations
and ISPs, including Lycos, Yahoo,
Citicorp Securities, Siemens, Lockheed,
Cisco, Motorola and Texas Instruments
have deployed NetApp solutions.
NetApp's Internet caching solutions
(NetCache) and file servers ("filers ")
deliver fast, simple, reliable and
cost-effective access to
network-stored data and enable
simultaneous shared file services for
UNIX(TM), Windows(R) and the World
Wide Web.
The company pioneered the concept of
the "network appliance," an extension
of the industry trend toward dedicated,
specialized products that perform a
single function. Network Appliance filers
and NetCache appliances are based on
the company's innovative data access
software known as Data ONTAP and
standards-compliant hardware. More
information is available at
netapp.com.
Note to Editors: NetApp is a registered
trademark and Network Appliance, Data
ONTAP and NetCache are trademarks of
Network Appliance, Inc. All other
brands or products are trademarks or
registered trademarks of their
respective holders and should be
treated as such.
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