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PRESS INFORMATION


                                                           FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
                                                                 AFTER 1PM (PST)
CONTACT:
Jeffry R. Allen
Vice President, Finance and Operations
and Chief Financial Officer
(408) 367-3212

Stan DeVaughn
Director, Corporate Communications
(408) 367-3203


              NETWORK APPLIANCE ACQUIRES INTERNET MIDDLEWARE CORP.

             IMC'S WEB PROXY CACHING TECHNOLOGY GREATLY ACCELERATES
                     USER ACCESS TO INTERNET/INTRANET DATA

SANTA CLARA, CALIFORNIA -- MARCH 17, 1997 -- Network Appliance, Inc. (NASDAQ:
NTAP) has signed a definitive purchase agreement under which it has acquired
privately-held Internet Middleware Corporation (IMC).

         Under terms of the purchase agreement, Network Appliance common  stock
and options worth approximately $10.5 million was exchanged for all outstanding
shares and options of IMC.  The acquisition will be treated as a purchase.
Allocation of the purchase price is expected to result in a one-time charge to
Network Appliance's income statement in the fourth quarter of the current
fiscal year of approximately $9.5 million, net of income taxes, related to the
purchase of in-process technology.

         IMC was founded in 1996 by University of Southern California Professor
Peter Danzig, a leading member of a web-caching research project sponsored
primarily by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) with additional
support from National Science Foundation (NSF).  The pioneering work, known





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as Harvest cache, showed that Web proxy caching significantly speeds
Internet/intranet access for users while decreasing the bandwidth needed on the
Internet.  IMC improved the performance in Harvest and prepared it for
commercial application.  IMC and Harvest-based products dominate the market for
Web proxy caching, and are used by more Internet service providers (ISPs) and
large companies worldwide than any other caching product.

         "Proxy-caching technology is a natural fit for NetApp products, which
are already well established in the infrastructure of leading ISPs in North
America and Europe, as well as corporate intranets," said Dan Warmenhoven,
president and CEO of Network Appliance.  "High- bandwidth applications and fast
modems are already straining ISP and corporate networks today, and as bandwidth
availability declines so will access to the data users need.  We can now offer
a superior solution to this problem," he said.

         "We are excited by the IMC-Network Appliance merger," said Mark
Towfiq, president of Intelenet, Inc., which is helping Toshiba America
Information Systems deploy Time Warner's cable modem services across the United
States. "We already use IMC's proxy caching and Network Appliance filer
products to reduce bandwidth costs and improve quality of service as part of
Time Warner's project. We would be very interested in a combination of these
two leading technologies in an appliance product for ease of deployment and
faster performance."

         Network Appliance is a market-leading supplier of dedicated,
network-data access servers, called filers, which enable users on computer
networks to quickly and easily share different types of file data.  The
Company's filers accelerate the performance of applications on a network for
users by dramatically reducing network response times.

         Except for the historical information contained in this announcement,
the discussion in this press release contains certain forward- looking
statements that involve risks and uncertainties.  The Company's actual results
could differ materially from those discussed here.  Factors that could cause or
contribute to





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such differences include compliance with accounting rules with regard to the
estimate of the amount to be expensed in the fourth quarter, and those
discussed in "risk factors" in the Company's Annual Report on Form 10K.

         Network Appliance filers deliver shared file service for UNIX, Windows
and the World Wide Web.  These devices deliver fast, simple, reliable, and
cost-effective access to data stored in the network.  The company pioneered the
concept of the "network appliance," an extension of the industry trend toward
dedicated, specialized products that perform a single function.  Network
Appliance filers are based on the company's innovative data access software
known as Data ONTAP and standards-compliant hardware.  More information is
available on the Internet at WWW.NETAPP.COM.





