Network Appliance Unveils Oracle Database Support

Network Appliance Inc. today will announce two new offerings to support Oracle Corp.s flagship database that help improve manageability and bolster the use of Oracles application clustering technology.

The storage vendor at Oracle AppsWorld 2002 in San Diego is rolling out SnapDrive for Oracle, software for managing Oracle 8i and Oracle 9i database deployments running on Microsoft Windows 2000. At the same time, Network Appliance is introducing a bundled offering of its NetApp filer storage appliances along with Solaris-based servers from Fujitsu Siemens Computers, a joint venture between Siemens AG and Fujitsu Ltd., for running Oracle 9is clustering technology called Real Application Clusters.

The SnapDrive data management software helps improve availability and manageability of data from enterprise applications, such as enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management systems, running in a multitiered architecture where the application sitting on an application server is connected to a database with network storage behind it, said Rich Clifton, vice president of commercial solutions marketing at the Sunnyvale, Calif., company. Through storage virtualization, the software allows a NetApp filer to present itself to the Oracle database as a locally attached device, which provides more centralized management of all storage resources, officials said.

"We created a technology that allows applications to operate in a local disk context and use network storage in a transparent fashion," Clifton said.

Along with Oracle, SnapDrive already is available for deployments of Microsoft Corp.s SQL Server, Clifton said. SnapDrive for Oracle costs between $3,000 and $12,000, depending on which NetApp filer is deployed.

On the hardware side, the certified Network Appliance and Fujitsu Siemens combination for Oracle application clustering is the first supporting NetApps filer storage in the Solaris environment, officials said. It runs the NetApp filers with Fujitsu Siemens PRIMEPOWER servers. Along with certifying the combination, the two companies are cooperating on offering joint customer support. The combined storage and server offering can be purchased as a bundle or individual components.