NEWS BRIEFS

Houston, TEXAS — Responding to exponential data growth in the Internet-driven New Economy, Compaq Computer Corporation took aim at the $6.5 billion network attached storage (NAS) market by introducing its new TaskSmart N-Series NAS appliance server, the first high-performance NAS product to provide customers with the breakthrough economics of standards-based computing. Compaq also announced complementary storage products, broadening its range of storage area network (SAN) offerings within its Enterprise Network Storage Architecture (ENSA) strategy (please see separate press release).

With the proliferation of data in today’s New Economy, customers require fast, simple, reliable access to their information to remain competitive. Market research with more than 200 IT managers indicates that NAS implementations will double over the next year, increasing the percentage of companies implementing NAS solutions to almost 50 percent.

“In today’s brick-and-click economy, data is king,” said Mary McDowell, Vice President and General Manager, Industry Standard Server Group, Compaq Computer Corp. “Our customers seek new ways to simplify their data management and drive down operational and infrastructure costs without compromising performance or data availability. We have responded to these needs with a new industry-standard appliance architecture that will redefine the NAS marketplace.”

The TaskSmart N-Series appliance is optimized out-of-the-box for high- performance file serving, making it the fastest NAS appliance in the industry and up to 50 percent faster than comparable general-purpose servers. With scalability ranging from 72 GB to 1 TB, the TaskSmart N-Series gives customers the flexibility of deployment across the enterprise, from the smallest branch office to the corporate data center.

The Compaq TaskSmart N-Series, supporting both Microsoft and Unix clients (CIFS and NFS) is the first NAS appliance based entirely on industry standards. This new architecture drives up to 50 percent initial cost savings over competitive products.

In addition to industry-standard hardware, the Compaq TaskSmart N-Series utilizes an optimized version of Microsoft Windows 2000 operating system to deliver high-performance, heterogeneous file serving.

“Building upon the high availability, scalability and rich interoperability delivered in Windows 2000, Compaq and Microsoft worked together to deliver an optimized solution for this rapidly growing market segment,” said Brian Valentine, Senior Vice President of the Windows Division at Microsoft Corp. “We are very excited to see Compaq select Windows 2000 as the platform of choice for its NAS solution.”

This combination of proven, standards technologies drives ongoing cost savings throughout the product lifecycle, providing seamless integration with existing client and application environments, reduced training requirements, familiar backup and systems management tools, and simplified spares strategy.

The Compaq TaskSmart N-Series is also designed for rapid deployment and simplified data management. Whether deployed centrally or remotely, the system can be configured in as little as 30 minutes. An integrated graphical user interface provides a single point for local and remote management, including powerful data management tools for online storage expansion, and instantaneous “snapshot” backup and recovery. In addition, Compaq’s Remote Insight Board provides lights-out management capabilities for large-scale and remote deployments. To provide continuous access to data, the system incorporates high availability features such as hardware RAID, redundant power and cooling, and load-sharing NICs.

“Compaq TaskSmart N-Series NAS appliance gives us the ability to consolidate storage and point many application servers to one device, which saves an enormous amount of work and hardware expense,” said Martha Gilbertson, Vice President of Product Management for Digex, a leading managed and Web application hosting service provider for business worldwide. “The ease of installation, manageability and density of the TaskSmart N-Series NAS appliance are important to us because we have to be able to grow our network quickly and within limited floor space as customer needs grow.”

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