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STORAGE PERFORMANCE COUNCIL ANNOUNCES SPC BENCHMARK-1

The Storage Performance Council (SPC) announces public availability of SPC Benchmark-1 (SPC-1), the first industry-standard benchmark for enterprise storage systems. This industry-standard benchmark, for the first time, gives customers a clearly applicable, vendor-neutral process to accurately compare and configure direct attach or network storage technology.

The SPC has constructed a complete multi-platform toolkit for SPC-1 that quickly evaluates performance and price/performance using a variety of storage topologies. SPC-1 is designed to:

• Establish a level playing field for test sponsors
• Provide value for IT consumers as well as solution integrators and engineers -- Produce official results in an easy-to-run, easy-to-audit/verify, and easy-to-use manner

To ensure authenticity, accuracy and compliance, the SPC requires completion of a results validation process -- including audit certification and peer review -- before benchmark results become official.

The SPC-1 benchmark toolkit is currently available for AIX, HP-UX, Solaris (SPARC), and Windows 2000. The toolkit may be purchased online at www.storageperformance.org.

"Enterprise applications increasingly must be online 24-7 and be online with consistently satisfactory performance," said Chuck Standafer of the Evaluator Group (www.evaluatorgroup.com). "In addition, with the advent of storage networks, configuring storage for the zero-latency enterprise requires industry-standard performance analysis tools and metrics."

"For many years the storage market has been in need of a standardized and audited industry performance metric. This benchmark is targeted to have broad market appeal for providers and consumers of storage networking technology. The storage benchmark SPC-1 is characterized predominantly as a random access environment for server-class computer systems and is modeled after the most ubiquitous applications in the market today -- Web servers, database servers and email servers," said Ian Birks, CEO of Ideas International.

The Storage Performance Council

The SPC is the only industry standards organization that defines and promotes storage benchmarks as well as disseminates objective, relevant and verifiable performance data and related test tools to the computer industry and its customers. Its members include 3PARdata Inc, Adaptec Inc, Cisco Systems Inc, DataCore Software Corporation, Data Storage Institute of the National University of Singapore, Dell Computer Corporation, Evaluator Group, Fidelity Investments, Florida Atlantic University, Fujitsu Technology Solutions Inc, Hewlett-Packard Company, Hitachi, IBM, Ideas International, LSI Logic Storage Systems, NEC Corporation, QLogic Corporation, Seagate Technology LLC, Spirent Communications, Stanford University, Storage Technology Corporation (StorageTek), Sun Microsystems Inc, Unisys and VERITAS Software Corporation, and YottaYotta Inc. The Storage Performance Council's strategic objectives are to empower storage vendors to build better products as well as to stimulate the IT community to more rapidly trust and deploy multi-vendor storage technology.

The SPC's first objective was to build a high-quality benchmark that would have the broadest possible appeal in the online enterprise storage market. The next objective for the SPC is to build a benchmark primarily focused on large block, sequential I/O processing, representing applications such as Video On Demand, Internet Image Download, Film Rendering, and Backup/Restore. The SPC-2 Workgroup has been formed to develop a formal proposal for the next SPC benchmark specification based upon those application types.

About the SPC

The SPC is a non-profit corporation founded to define, standardize and promote storage system benchmarks and to disseminate objective, verifiable performance data to the computer industry and its customers. SPC membership is open to all companies, academic institutions and individuals.

For more information, call 650-556-9384 or visit www.storageperformance.org.

Contact: Waler E. Baker, Storage Performance Council, 650-556-9384, Fax: 650-556-9385, spcadmin@storageperformance.org .