NetApp, Oracle Team

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Network Appliance, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTAP - News), a leading provider of storage and data management solutions today announced the joint collaboration on the development of Direct NFS Client, a breakthrough innovation included in Oracle Database 11g that helps provide customers with improved performance, simplified management, increased flexibility, and better application availability. Leveraging its experience in delivering simplified storage solutions for production grid environments, most notably as a storage platform for Oracle On Demand, NetApp collaborated with Oracle to provide Oracle Database 11g with significant performance improvements in IP-based environments.

Implementing a NFS client in the Database allows Oracle to directly access NFS V3 servers. Direct NFS Client is designed to create a single, unified management configuration within a standard interface that allows Oracle customers to run applications across heterogeneous hardware and operating system platforms. Direct NFS Client is optimized for Oracle Database server and provides relief from operating system based NFS client tuning. Direct NFS Client can use multiple Network Interface Cards (NICs) to provide high availability (HA) and bandwidth aggregation. The results are significant performance over a simplified operational framework. Direct NFS Client adds significant performance and simplicity to running databases over the most advanced and mature storage network virtualization technology in the industry. When combined with NetApp® storage virtualization, Direct NFS Client results in a dramatically advanced state-of-the-art commercial grid infrastructure. Plus, the tight integration and collaboration of NetApp and Oracle offer Oracle Database 11g customers simplified management tools without sacrificing performance throughput or resource utilization.

With Direct NFS Client, Oracle and NetApp enable all enterprise grid customers, large and small, to lower total cost of ownership (TCO), reduced complexity, improved performance, and better management of their database environments. This was demonstrated through benchmark tests of kernel NFS versus Direct NFS Client that exhibited the following results:

In addition, Direct NFS Client enables Oracle Database 11g on Windows® to directly use NFS protocol to install NFS filers--a development that will enable more small and medium-sized businesses to reduce cost, simplify data management, and scale the performance of their Oracle environments. Plus customers can now leverage enterprise-class features in Oracle Database 11g, including RAC and ASM, to further develop and grow their grid computing environment."Oracle has a long history of innovation and collaboration with NetApp," said Juan Loaiza, senior vice president, Database Server Technologies at Oracle. "NetApp has the engineering expertise and NFS know-how needed to support the development of Direct NFS Client. Together, we have created and introduced a key feature of Oracle Database 11g that not only maximizes database performance for our customers but also further simplifies management of small and large-scale grid environments."

Network Appliance Inc. (Nasdaq: NTAP)

Oracle Corp.