Sunnyvale, Calif. - April 20, 2004 -- Network Appliance, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTAP), a leading provider of enterprise network storage solutions, today announced it has joined industry leaders in founding the Enterprise Grid Alliance (EGA), a consortium created to develop enterprise grid solutions and accelerate the deployment of grid computing.

NetApp will provide the key storage infrastructure and data management technology in several areas throughout the grid infrastructure. With NetApp's expertise in storage provisioning, clustering, global file systems, distributed storage environments, data-movement and mirroring, along with its ability to provide high-performance and capacity scaling, enterprises will be able to meet all their storage grid needs.

"Enterprise grid computing is the next logical step in the evolution of IT," said Phil Brotherton, senior director of marketing at Network Appliance. "As the creator of the enterprise storage grid, Network Appliance has a deep understanding of the scalable, manageable, and cost-effective environment that grid computing can deliver. For over twelve years, we've worked closely with our customers to solve these enterprise challenges, and are excited to be a key driver in advancing enterprise grid computing from development and standards ratification to widespread adoption."

The EGA is an open, independent and vendor-neutral community addressing the near-term requirements for deploying commercial applications in a grid environment. Initial focus areas include reference models, provisioning, security and accounting. The Alliance will address obstacles that organizations face using enterprise grids, by looking at best practices and solutions that are open and interoperable. By focusing exclusively on the needs of enterprise users, the EGA will enable businesses to realize the many benefits of grid computing such as faster response to changing business needs, better utilization and service level performance and lower IT operating costs.

"Although grid computing is already well-established in the academic, research and technical sectors it has yet to gain significant traction throughout the enterprise," said Donald Deutsch, president, Enterprise Grid Alliance and vice president, standards strategy and architecture, Oracle Corp. "In close coordination, the members of the EGA will create open, interoperable enterprise grid computing solutions and increase the adoption of enterprise grid computing."

Representing a broad cross-section of leading technology companies, Network Appliance will join additional founding board members-EMC, Fujitsu-Siemens, HP, Intel, NEC, Oracle and Sun Microsystems-to drive adoption of grid computing. Specifically, the board of directors will participate in and chair committees and vote to approve the consortium's output and core capabilities.

About Network Appliance
Network Appliance is a world leader in unified storage solutions for today's data-intensive enterprise. Since its inception in 1992, Network Appliance has delivered technology, product and partner firsts that continue to drive "The evolution of storage.™" Information about Network Appliance™ solutions and services is available at www.netapp.com.

About Enterprise Grid Alliance
The Enterprise Grid Alliance is an open consortium focused on developing and promoting enterprise grid solutions. Membership is open to all organizations via multiple participation tiers. For more information, please visit our Web site at http://www.ogf.org/

Press Contact:
Jaime Leigh Le
Network Appliance, Inc.
408.822.3761
jle@netapp.com