NetApp buys Spinnaker Networks

FRAMINGHAM (11/07/2003) - Network Appliance Inc. is buying privately held Spinnaker Networks Inc. for about US$300 million in an all-stock deal aimed at boosting Network Appliance's high-end storage products and get its "storage grid" architecture to market more quickly, executives from the companies said this week. Spinnaker develops enterprise-class network-attached storage products, with a family of NAS servers and a global distributed file system, Spin FS, on the market. Network Appliance provides storage network infrastructure wares. Network Appliance executives did not offer a time frame for when the storage grid architecture will be released, but pledged an update in the coming weeks.