Network Appliance, Inc., a leading provider of storage and data management solutions, today announced its support for Oracle® VM, a powerful and easy-to-use solution that delivers the benefits of server virtualization and enables enterprises to effectively utilize resources to further lower computing costs with industry leading, enterprise-class support for their virtual environments.

Oracle VM is a fast, scalable, low-cost server virtualization software that fully supports both Oracle and non-Oracle applications. NetApp complements and strengthens Oracle VM with storage solutions that are best suited for customers’ virtualized environments.

Traditionally, companies deployed IT systems that were specific to each application, resulting in silos of IT infrastructures that became more challenging to manage as they grew. The Oracle and NetApp strategy is to provide customers an enterprise class infrastructure that combines the benefits of grid computing and virtualization technologies. Together, NetApp and Oracle enable customers to pool shared resources to rapidly respond to changing business environments and to create a resilient, highest availability infrastructure for all business and mission-critical applications and databases.

Oracle VM allows users to create and manage virtual machines that exist on the same physical server but behave like independent physical servers, each with its own virtual CPUs, network interfaces, storage, and operating system. With Oracle VM, users can easily consolidate many smaller, underutilized servers and significantly improve utilization of existing resources, thereby improving their ability to respond to business changes, while helping to reduce planned downtime and overall management costs.

The NetApp® Data ONTAP® data management software enables Oracle customers to streamline and simplify processes that reduce the time required for backup and restores, improving application availability and data protection, with no performance penalty. In addition, NetApp thin provisioning, Snapshot™, and deduplication capabilities simplify data management to enable increased productivity and flexibility of IT resources, better storage utilization, and significantly improved storage efficiency, reducing the power, space, and cooling required in data center environments.

Together, NetApp and Oracle provide the most flexible, resilient, and efficient IT infrastructure for virtualized environments, enabling improved server and storage utilization, ease of management, and reduced costs. The combination of NetApp storage and Oracle server virtualization solutions means that customers can deploy various applications and leverage a unified and highly flexible IT infrastructure for NAS (network-attached storage), FC SAN (storage area network), and IP SAN environments.

“The combination of NetApp storage systems and Oracle VM provides an ideal virtualization platform to our customers,” said Monica Kumar, senior director, Linux and Open Source Product Marketing at Oracle. “As our relationship continues to expand, NetApp and Oracle are committed to developing solutions that enable our joint customers to leverage a virtualized infrastructure to simplify IT management and increase utilization of their existing systems.”

“NetApp and Oracle have a strong relationship that has resulted in the development of innovative technologies to reduce cost and complexity,” said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Solutions Marketing at NetApp. “Oracle has been at the center of driving the key benefits of Linux® in the data center. The combination of Oracle and NetApp server and storage virtualization will allow our customers to automatically leverage and gain the benefits of a virtualized environment, resulting in rapid scale, application agility, and system independence.”

For more information on NetApp solutions for Oracle environments, please visit http://www.netapp.com/partners/oracle/. NetApp is a Certified Advantage Partner in the Oracle PartnerNetwork.