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Participation Demonstrates a Commitment to Delivering Open Source Solutions for Increased Customer Flexibility With InfiniBand -- Network Appliance, Inc., the leader in advanced networked storage solutions for today's data-intensive enterprise, announced its participation in the OpenIB Alliance, an industry association chartered to deliver a single open source Linux software stack for deployment of the InfiniBand architecture. This announcement highlights the company's dedication to developing technologies and storage solutions that leverage the performance and flexibility of InfiniBand to dramatically increase data availability, scalability, and flexibility across the network for enterprise customers. InfiniBand adoption is increasing among global enterprises and is now considered a critical enabling technology to maximize the benefits from scalable enterprise applications. Together, NetApp(R) storage systems and the OpenIB Alliance software will bring the advantages of InfiniBand to high performance computing (HPC) enterprise environments. Network Appliance is a founding member of the InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA), which is the OpenIB Alliance's predecessor that defined InfiniBand architecture specifications. Through participation in the OpenIB Alliance and support of InfiniBand, Network Appliance brings unique, relevant, and complementary network storage expertise to better advance storage and computing standards for the benefit of the industry and enterprise customers worldwide. "The development of a Linux software stack is of critical importance to the adoption of the remote direct memory access (RDMA) solutions," said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Marketing at Network Appliance. "Once the OpenIB Alliance software stack is available customers will be empowered to build large-scale Linux grids with heightened performance and reduced expenses. This complements our ongoing work on InfiniBand and other RDMA technology innovations." Network Appliance continues to take a leading role in initiatives such as the RDMA Consortium, the DAT Collaborative, and the Open Group InterConnect Software Consortium, as well as participation in the IBTA. The OpenIB Alliance plans to deliver its first software this quarter with future software enhancements expected on a quarterly basis. More information about the organization can be found at www.openib.org.