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Network Appliance Inc. is aiming to help customers gain greater control of their Oracle Corp. database environments by marrying its disk-based backup and recovery technology with Oracles storage management capabilities.
This week, NetApp will introduce SnapManager for Oracle. The new product is designed to simplify database administrator and storage administrator tasks by using NetApp SnapShot and FlexClone technology to capture all relevant data, log files and code, and cut restoration times without the need for extra scripting, according to Patrick Rogers, vice president of products and partners for NetApp, in Sunnyvale, Calif.
Currently available in beta, SnapManager for Oracle will be generally available in January, with prices ranging from $5,000 to $50,000 per customer, said Rogers.
NetApp also will launch its next-generation NearStore R210 product later this quarter, with a lower entry price and upgradability to Clustered Failover capabilities, said NetApp officials. In addition, NetApp will introduce a higher-end product above its FAS980 next quarter.
SnapManager for Oracle will be sold by NetApp as an add-on to Oracle9i and Oracle 10g databases and will work with those products Automatic Storage Management and Recovery Manager features. The software is tightly integrated with Oracles Grid Control (previously named Oracle Enterprise Manager) product to provide customers with full monitoring capabilities and the ability to kick off snapshots directly from the console recognizing the NetApp storage resources.
Richard Capellano, global head of infrastructure for Susquehanna International Group LLP, in Bala Cynwyd, Pa., said recovery time and flexibility for his Oracle databases are critical.
“[Oracle for] SnapManager allows us to take a lot of the processes we have in place that are reasonably manual and allows us to use Oracle as the management tool working directly with NetApp functionality,” said Capellano. “It knows all the components it needs to get your database back as a whole environment. Thats really critical to us.
“Hardware has gotten to a point where it can handle anything we can throw at it, so the value add at this point is intelligence. Its nice when a vendor can add that type of intelligence to your infrastructure,” Capellano said.
