The Cube - NetApp Customer Day at VMworld 2012 - Pat Gelsinger, VMware, with Dave Vellante NetApp is doubling down on the ecosystem in a move to establish its Data ONTAP operating system as the foundation for a ‘universal data platform’ that spans the private, public and hybrid clouds. The storage vendor has recently taken another step toward this goal with the release of new integrations with Oracle software. Building an existing line of products and services for Oracle users, NetApp is introducing a plugin that will enable customers to create snapshots of their relational databases with its FlexClone solution. The company is also expanding support for Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c with new capabilities that enable admins to monitor ONTAP deployments and manage databases on the fly from within the native interface. “NetApp has a vision of enabling customers to achieve maximum business success by leveraging the cloud,” stated Brendon Howe, the vice president of product and solutions marketing at NetApp. ”With more than a decade of joint product testing and innovation between the two companies, we are rolling out offerings that help customers quickly deploy Oracle application and database environments while storing and managing this business-critical data across multiple cloud resources.” NetApp’s latest push into the relational database market comes just days after it became the first non-founding Governing Member of the Open Virtualization Alliance, an organization dedicated to popularizing open-source virtualization. The company is diversifying its channel as well its portfolio in an effort to make cloud environments more interoperable via integrations and open standards. Last week, NetApp announced a hypervisor translation layer that will facilitate workload migrations between disparate ONTAP environments that utilize different virtualization technologies. The vendor also disclosed plans to release new FlexPod reference architectures for large-scale cloud and multi-tenant enterprise environments.