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Pharmaceutical Firm Selects Auspex NSc3000 NS Controller

Auspex Systems Inc has announced the sale of an Auspex NSc3000 Network Storage Controller to The F. Dohmen Company, one of the largest private pharmaceutical wholesalers in the U.S. as well as a provider of pharmaceutical management systems for prescription processing and other applications. Wisconsin-based Dohmen selected the NSc3000 to provide file services for a major information systems upgrade that will include implementation of a Hitachi Freedom SAN and migration to an SAP enterprise man agement environment.

Use of the Auspex controller will eliminate the need for Dohmen to purchase and maintain separate Storage Area Network (SAN) and Network Attached Storage (NAS) storage systems to serve databases and files, respectively. Instead, the NSc3000 will allow files to be served directly from the company's new Hitachi SAN utilizing NAS protocols. File-based information will be housed on excess disk capacity on the SAN rather than on a dedicated NAS server, streamlining Dohmen's storage management and lowering the total cost of storage ownership. The Auspex NSc3000 will also expedite implementation of Dohmen's new SAP platform by allowing tables, policy rules and other SAP elements to be reviewed simultaneously by any number of users during the testing phase. In addition, the controller's sophisticated file sharing capabilities will simplify ongoing monitoring of the company's SAP environment after the system goes live.

"The Auspex NSc3000 will play a key role in Dohmen's new IT infrastructure because it will provide critical file sharing functionality without the extra hardware and maintenance expense of deploying a conventional NAS server," said Gordon Nyquist, President of Mercury Storage, a Michigan-based storage reseller that developed the specifications for the upgrade. "We selected the Auspex product because we knew it would minimize costs, reduce administration, and give us the flexibility to suggest any number of SAN solutions."

The Auspex NSc3000 is the first SAN-to-NAS gateway designed to operate with SAN equipment from multiple vendors. This open systems strategy provides a high-performance file serving solution for virtually any homogeneous or heterogeneous SAN, allows a single gateway to be used to access files in heterogeneous SAN environments, and permits enterprises to mix disparate storage media to suit their budgets and storage management needs.

The Auspex controller also provides the market's highest performance and capacity in a SAN-to-NAS gateway, bilingual UNIX and Windows support, and the full NAS feature set expected by IT administrators, including support for NDMP-based data backup and point-in-time copies.

About Auspex Systems

Auspex introduced the world's first Network Attached Storage (NAS) server shortly after its founding in 1987, creating a new breed of storage appliance offering significant performance and administrative benefits over generalpurpose file servers. Auspex's enterprise-class network servers are used worldwide for consolidated information storage and delivery. Auspex also is leading the convergence of NAS with Storage Area Networks (SANs) with the NSc3000 Network Storage Controller, the first multivendor SAN-to-NAS gateway. The company is headquartered in Santa Clara, California, with sales offices and channel partners throughout the U.S. and around the globe. Its shares are traded on the Nasdaq under the symbol ASPX. For more information, call 800-4AUSPEX (800-428-7739) or 408-566-2000, or visit www.auspex.com.

Contact: Jill Schmidt, jills@sspr.com, 847-955-7730, Auspex Systems Inc.