Shares in Mountain View, California-based Network Appliance Inc rose 8% to $55 on the news that Oracle Corp has certified the company’s network file servers known as NetApp filers, for storage of Oracle databases. The two companies will also co- develop software to guarantee data integrity and increased performance from integrating the NetApp multiprotocol filer – which supports Unix NFS Network File System, Windows CIFS Common Internet File System and HTTP Hyper Text Transfer Protocol – into the Oracle database environments. Network Appliance claims that by using its dedicated network-attached storage devices to access Oracle data, companies are seeing up to a 50% increase in query access times. The filers use the company’s patented WAFL file system, which it says reduces input/output bottlenecks by offloading the overhead of file management to the CPU, from the application. It also claims to enhance Oracle’s hot back-up facility using a NetApp feature known as Snapshot, which maintains an online, read-only copy of the file system, which cuts users exposure to online back-up to minutes instead of hours. Network Appliance claims NetApp filers are the first and only network file servers to be certified by Oracle. The filers are optimized for network data access and retrieval, and support Unix, NT and internet systems. The company also announced an agreement with Alteon Networks Inc, to deliver an advanced Gigabit Ethernet data access system incorporating Alteon’s high- performance Gigabit Ethernet Server Switching system, which should be available next month.
