Network Appliance, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTAP) today announced its intent to work with SAP AG in an effort to help enterprises simplify data management in the SAP NetWeaver® platform. At the heart of the integration is NetApp® storage virtualization for SAP® Enterprise Services-Ready solution environments. The combination of NetApp virtualization solutions with storage management via the SAP Enterprise Services Computing framework further improves productivity and accelerates SAP solution deployments. As a result of NetApp participation in the SAP Enterprise Services-Ready program, customers will be able to leverage the NetApp cloning and data protection software via a standardized set of storage services, increasing SAP application uptime and time to market.

Working together, NetApp and SAP will enable customers to reduce their total cost of ownership (TCO), simplify SAP data management, and improve the flexibility and time to market advantages of their data infrastructure.

Building on previous work with SAP’s Adaptive Computing infrastructure, these storage services will bring NetApp storage virtualization capabilities to SAP Enterprise Services-Ready solution environments and will utilize NetApp backup and recovery, cloning, distributed and flexible file caching technologies.

“NetApp has distinguished itself as among our most innovative partners,” said Geoge Paolini, executive vice president, Platform Ecosystem at SAP. “Our latest work together—focused around streamlining data management tasks—points to that innovation and how it pays off for customers in greater storage asset utilization, tighter integration between SAP software and NetApp systems, and ultimately a lower total cost of ownership in an IT environment.”

“NetApp and SAP continue to build upon our solid foundation created with one goal in mind—simplifying data management in SAP and NetApp solution environments for our enterprise customers,” said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Products and Partners at Network Appliance. “Our history of work with SAP around Adaptive Computing now paired with the unique NetApp Data ONTAP™ 7G software with FlexVol™ and FlexClone™ technologies has created added value for SAP ESA installations. NetApp is focused on helping our customers business grow—not on battling to scale their infrastructure. We’re thrilled about working with SAP on this integration.”

More information on NetApp offerings for SAP-solution based environments can be found at http://www.netapp.com/partners/sap.