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BakBone Software Announces MagnaVault 2.3.0

BakBone Software, a global provider of nearline storage management software, has announced the availability of MagnaVault 2.3.0, the latest version of the industry-leading software for UNIX/Linux-based optical storage. MagnaVault 2.3.0 offers new global caching for faster data storage and retrieval on optical media and expanded platform support.

MagnaVault, a leader in versatile and robust system software, improves an enterprise's ability to rapidly store and retrieve documents and images to and from optical media, including CDs, DVDs and magneto-optical (MO) disks. Installed on a server, MagnaVault provides seamless data access to all existing application software and utilities.

Among the enhancements featured in MagnaVault 2.3.0:

• Global Caching for faster access to data stored on optical media. The caching feature needs little or no configuration. In many cases, directory contents are accessible to the user without media being present in the drive;
• Support for Linux 2.4, the latest Linux operating system;
• Support for Tru64 5.1;
• Improvement in UDF write performance from earlier versions, providing higher productivity and enhancing MagnaVault's reputation as the clear leader in throughput and performance in the optical storage software market;
• Enhanced device support for newer DVD and MO libraries and drives, with features such as media pack management and bar code support.

"As storage needs continue to grow and change, the need for faster data access has become essential. With global caching, information stored on optical devices is now available at hard disk speed, in many cases," said Adrian Hodgson, MagnaVault Product Manager, BakBone Software.

Pricing and Availability

Pricing for BakBone's MagnaVault 2.3.0 begins at US$3495. The software is available on September 23, 2002 through MagnaVault's network of value-added distributors (VADs). More information is available directly from BakBone Software at 858-450-9009.

About BakBone Software Inc

BakBone Software is an international storage management software company that develops and globally distributes high-performance software solutions to the network storage and open systems markets. BakBone's near-line archival and backup/restore software suites provide scalable data protection from the workgroup to the enterprise. Founded in 2000, BakBone Software's products are used by companies worldwide, and are distributed through a network of OEMs and solution providers.

BakBone's corporate headquarters is located at 10145 Pacific Heights Boulevard, San Diego, California 92121. For more information on BakBone products, call 866-484-2663, e-mail sales@bakbone.com, or access BakBone's Website at www.bakbone.com.

Contact: Chanda Idano, BakBone Software Inc, 858-450-9009, chanda.idano@bakbone.com.

E-Z-SAN Partners Exhibit Storage Solution At IBC

Strategic partners JMR Electronics, a leading manufacturer of data storage solutions, and Sanbolic Inc, a developer and manufacturer of advanced software for shared storage, showcased E-Z-SAN at the International Broadcasting Convention (IBC) in Amsterdam RAI September 13-17.

The IBC Exhibition is an international broadcast event featuring nearly 1,000 exhibits showcasing the latest technology and business ideas in broadcasting and media. Run by the broadcast industry for the broadcast industry, IBC attracts 45,000 visitors from more than 120 countries and offers visitors expertise and opportunities in the fields of content creation, management and delivery.

"With a product perfectly suited for broadcast, this is an extremely exciting and important exhibit for us to showcase our E-Z-SAN storage solution," said Duran Alabi, Director of Strategic Marketing at JMR. "The IBC Exhibition is the international broadcast event of the year and we are pleased to have the opportunity to demonstrate the strengths of E-Z-SAN in front of broadcast executives and IT managers."

JMR's interoperability tested, verified and certified E-Z-SAN is a Fibre-to-Fibre or Fibre-to-Ultra 160 complete SAN storage solution. Leveraging the experience and innovation of 11 top storage companies, it includes a full complement of SAN management software.

E-Z-SAN incorporates rack-mountable components that consist of dual Fibre Channel (FC)-to-Ultra 160 SCSI RAID or Dual FC-FC controllers, disk drives, fabric switch, FC host bus adapters and includes backup, virtualization and SAN management and data sharing software.

"We have looked at the needs of the broadcast and postproduction customers and through E-Z-SAN are offering a complete storage solution that can fulfill the requirements of the applications used in these environments. Reducing production time by providing multiple paths to the data, while keeping throughput capacity, and providing efficient back up is some of the functionality provided by E-Z-SAN," said Eva Helen, vice president of Business Development at Sanbolic. "E-Z-SAN is a solid foundation for audio and video applications."

In addition to the E-Z-SAN solution, JMR will also be displaying its FORTRA Force(4). FORTRA Force(4) takes JMR's industry-proven FORTRA 15-bay, 2GB, Fibre Channel storage enclosures and combines them with Intel's 2GB Fibre Channel PCI RAID Controller and Seagate's 18, 36 or 73GB Cheetah X 15 series, 2GB, Fibre Channel disk drives -- resulting in a robust, fast, fault-tolerant 2GB Fibre Channel enterprise storage solution.

About Sanbolic

Sanbolic Inc is a privately held company incorporated in 2000 and located in Watertown, Massachusetts. Sanbolic Inc is providing the market with the latest software for sharing and access of data. The product offerings are Kayo, volume sharing software, and Melio FS, a highly scalable, shared file system with heterogeneous operating system support for networked storage systems. Kayo is available worldwide, through a network of resellers and system integrators. For more information, contact Sanbolic Inc, 304 Pleasant Street, Watertown, MA 02472, USA. 617-926-2806. fax: 617.926.2808. E-mail: info@sanbolic.com, Website: www.sanbolic.com.

About JMR

JMR was one of the first manufacturers to develop a complete family of Fibre Channel storage solutions. Its FORTRA family is an advanced, modular storage technology incorporating patented technologies. Solutions span from 4-, 6-, 8- and 10-bay desktop JBODs to 10- and 15-bay Fibre-to-Fibre RAID solutions. JMR also manufactures the widest selection of SCSI solutions. The wide array of JMR offerings is designed to handle both bandwidth- and I/O-intensive environments and scale from 120 megabytes to terabytes and petabytes of data. JMR is among the 11 leading hardware and software partners involved in the Open Storage Management Resources (OSMR) program in the United States and Europe. These manufacturers have joined forces to ensure product-to-product compatibility and deliver simplified and affordable SAN solutions to the market. E-Z-SAN is the first certified product from this alliance and provides 1.1 terabytes and more of easily managed storage. Additional information on JMR and its product offerings can be found at www.jmr.com.

Contact: Pamela Lormans, JMR Electronics, 818-993-4801x171, pamela@jmr.com.

XIOtech Corp And Nishan Systems Offer New SAN/WAN Solution

XIOtech Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Seagate Technology and a networked storage pioneer, and Nishan Systems, one of the world's first suppliers of native IP storage solutions, have announced the availability of a SAN/WAN solution. This solution is a tested and integrated end-to-end strategy that offers the benefits of a Fibre Channel (FC) SAN along with offsite data replication over an Internet Protocol (IP) network -- at an affordable price.

"It is critical for today's organizations to protect its data against all types of downtime -- both planned and unplanned," said Bob Passmore, research director for enterprise servers and storage, at Gartner. "A solution utilizing Fibre Channel over IP provides the basis for implementing an affordable and effective remote data replication strategy, without straining the IT budget."

FC is an outstanding choice for SAN connectivity, providing a high-performance conduit through which servers can access centralized data. IP allows companies to move data across the Internet, creating connectivity over much greater distances than traditional FC. This solution combines the performance of FC with the availability and connectivity of IP over long distances, to create an easy, affordable option for creating a wide area network (WAN).

"The business benefits of this solution are considerable," said Dan McCormick, vice president of worldwide marketing for XIOtech. "Benefits include consistent availability of data and applications, ease of use and manageability, and outstanding ROI. Servers and backup resources can be consolidated and a single switch provides FC and IP connectivity in a tremendously scalable and adaptive environment."

Combining the features and functions of XIOtech's software, its MAGNITUDE hardware platform, and Nishan's wire-speed IPS 4300 Multiprotocol Switch, companies can now implement a solution that provides affordable data center IP SAN scalability, integration with all Fibre Channel devices, and off-site redundancy.

"XIOtech's MAGNITUDE hardware platform is a great storage foundation for our Multiprotocol Switch networks," said Mark S. Hicks, vice president of business development at Nishan Systems. "The flexibility built into our switch is perfectly matched by the capabilities of the MAGNITUDE and its virtualization technology. Together we have a solution that practically eliminates planned downtime and ensures that data will survive a local disaster and can be restored quickly."

About XIOtech

XIOtech Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Seagate, develops comprehensive network storage solutions for business customers. The XIOtech MAGNITUDE SAN hardware platform is based on the company's exclusive REal-Time Data Intelligence (REDI) software family -- the first in the industry to incorporate true storage virtualization. The MAGNITUDE hardware platform, along with XIOtech's comprehensive suite of application-specific software, makes storing, managing, safeguarding, and retrieving data on heterogeneous computing platforms easy and cost effective. For more information, visit XIOtech's Website at www.xiotech.com, call 952- 983-3000, or email info@xiotech.com.

About Seagate

Seagate is one of the world's leading providers of storage technology for Internet, business, and consumer applications. The company's products include disk drives for the enterprise, PC, and consumer electronics markets, as well as SAN solutions. Seagate's market leadership is based on delivering award-winning products, customer support, and reliability to meet the world's growing demand for information storage. Seagate can be found around the globe and at www.seagate.com.

About Nishan Systems

Nishan Systems, one of the world's first suppliers of native IP Storage solutions, builds open storage networking products based on IP and Ethernet, the international networking standards. Nishan's Multiprotocol Storage framework supports iSCSI, iFCP, FCIP, iSNS, Fibre Channel, and all types of Network-Attached Storage (NAS) interfaces. The highly reliable and manageable IP Storage fabric extends seamlessly from the data center to the metro area and beyond. Nishan's products are fully compatible with the millions of LAN, MAN, and WAN routers and switches already installed and mastered by IT professionals. Nishan Systems has been named to top company rankings in Computerworld, Red Herring Magazine, and the San Francisco Chronicle, and Nishan's IP Storage switches recently received the InfoWorld Readers' Choice Award for best new storage products. Nishan Systems, a full voting member of the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), is based in San Jose, California, and can be reached at www.NishanSystems.com, and at 408-519-3700.

Contact: Rachel Gold, 952-983-2278, rachel--gold@xiotech.com.

Rhapsody Delivers New Developer Kit For SAN-Based Storage

Rhapsody Networks has announced the general availability of its XPath Software Developer's Kit (SDK) and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for use by storage software application developers. The announcement represents the industry's first tool set for the standardization and easy migration of storage applications to run within storage area networks (SANs). Historically, storage applications have run on either server hosts or storage arrays, but the industry is moving to a more network-centric application paradigm in an effort to ease growing storage management complexities and associated costs.

"The rapid adoption of the XPath platform illustrates the growing industry interest in simplifying storage management by moving intelligence to the network," said Rhapsody Networks president and CEO, Mike Klayko. "More and more storage application providers and enterprises are embracing this vision, and we anticipate an even wider scope of recognition in the coming months."

Rhapsody's XPath API and services provide a rich storage application platform that supports a broad range of block storage capabilities, including virtual disk, virtual tape, copy-on-write snapshots, n-way mirroring, and online data migration, providing application developers a simplified and accelerated development environment. A number of industry-leading solution vendors have already endorsed the XPath development environment for virtualization, virtual tape and disaster recovery applications optimized for running within the network.

Rhapsody first collaborated with VERITAS Software, one of the leading storage software companies, to bring storage management software to storage networking environments, extending VERITAS' industry leading storage virtualization solution to the Rhapsody platform. The companies worked together through VERITAS Powered, a program that delivers embedded VERITAS storage software to networking hardware platforms.

"Organizations require flexible storage management solutions that allow them to manage complex storage networks with consistency, even as their needs change," said Robert Soderbery, vice president, business development, VERITAS Software. "Leveraging Rhapsody's XPath API enables the two companies to more quickly develop solutions that help companies better manage the performance and availability of their storage environments."

Alacritus Software, a leading provider of virtual tape emulation software, also selected the Rhapsody platform to develop its first SAN-centric storage application. "The value proposition of network-centric disk-to-disk backup is extremely compelling to the end user, and Rhapsody has created a superb platform for us to run on", said Don Trimmer, President of Alacritus. "Rhapsody's easy-to-use and flexible API allowed us to quickly adapt Securitus to Rhapsody's Storage Application Director."

Falconstor, Store-Age Networking Technologies and Topio also announced partnerships with Rhapsody last month, expanding the range of storage software available on the Rhapsody platform.

About the Rhapsody XPath Software Developer's Kit (SDK)

Rhapsody's XPath SDK and API services were designed to enable rapid migration of existing and new storage applications to run on Rhapsody's Application Director platforms by providing an all-inclusive development environment: platform API libraries, a run-time framework, reference documentation and sample applications. For more details on the Rhapsody XPath SDK/API services, please contact partners@rhapsodynetworks.com.

About Rhapsody Networks

Rhapsody Networks is a provider of intelligent storage networking products that reduce the complexity and cost of managing corporate information. Rhapsody products are based on patent-pending XPath technology, which provides unprecedented scalability and flexibility for the management of enterprise storage area networks. Rhapsody Networks is headquartered in Fremont, CA, and can be reached at 510-743-3000 and www.rhapsodynetworks.com.

Contact: Larry Sennett, Rhapsody Networks, 415-272-6689, lsennett@hemisphereinc.com.