Features - Storage Innovations:

AKARA'S OUSP SOLUTION BECOMES IBM TOTALSTORAGE PROVEN

Akara, a leading provider of Storage over SONET extension solutions for business continuance and disaster recovery, announced recently that it has expanded its IBM TotalStorage Proven status by successfully completing interoperability testing of Akara's OUSP with IBM's FAStT Remote Mirror Option for the TotalStorage FAStT500 and FAStT700 products. Additionally, in testing, the OUSP successfully extended IBM's remote mirroring application out to 1,000 kilometers over an equivalent of a DS3 service. Over metropolitan distances, IBM storage customers can also now use the OUSP to support up to 8 Fibre Channel services on a single network connection, helping to reduce capital and connectivity costs.

"Our expanded interoperability with IBM reflects our achievements in gaining qualifications with a major leading storage and SAN vendor," said Ed Ogonek, Akara's CEO. "Our growing customer base relies on Akara for the ability to extend their most advanced business continuance applications between data centers over any distance, while reducing operating and capital costs and ensuring compatibility with major vendors' storage technology. The OUSP delivers tangible value our customers can leverage to support their existing and future storage extension needs while gaining a highly efficient, low-cost storage network."

Akara's OUSP is a multi protocol storage extension device that multiplexes data center protocols such as Fibre Channel, FICON, ESCON and GbE directly into flexible SONET payloads to extend enterprises' business continuance applications over existing SONET/SDH, dark fiber or DWDM networks, delivering reliable, lowest cost per megabyte storage extension. Akara enables enterprises to support multiple applications, such as IBM's TotalStorage FAStT Remote Mirror Option, on a single network connection, and provision bandwidth required by each application while maintaining the critical isolation between different applications and ports, helping to reduce capital costs and management complexity.

Akara solutions provide many connectivity options ranging from DS3 to OC-48, DWDM or dark fiber, enabling a customer's enterprise WAN choices to be aligned with their requirements and allowing them to pay for exactly the performance they require along with the ability to change protocols, e.g. ESCON to FICON, through simple software commands. In addition, the OUSP's comprehensive monitoring and fault isolation features allow end-users to monitor the application performance and provide the ability to rapidly detect and isolate errors to either the local or wide area network. In the event of a WAN failure, the OUSP can provide automatic re-balancing of traffic, ensuring no interruption of service.

"The IBM TotalStorage Proven program provides customers with tested and interoperable-storage solutions to meet their ever-growing storage networking needs," said Kathleen Smith, vice president, Emerging Business Markets for IBM's Systems Group. "With the increased visibility of Akara's OUSP solution to the IBM Business Partner and sales representative community, Akara can have greater visibility with customers and look towards smoother, reliable implementations. This can lead to reduced sales cycles and ultimately increase customer satisfaction."

The IBM TotalStorage Proven program supports the ability of Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to build high-quality solutions with the latest technology on leading storage platforms, as well as reduce solution design time when multiple, tested building blocks have already been pre-tested. The program certification process ensures that applications and hardware from leading companies such as Akara, combined with IBM state-of-the art technology, provide customers with flexible, ready to run, easily installed solutions that address their software and infrastructure needs.

About Akara

Akara, a Storage over SONET market leader, is the only equipment supplier with a singular focus on extending business continuance applications between data centers with the lowest MByte per mile cost across existing MAN/WAN networks. Akara's solutions significantly reduces operational and capital expense by leveraging the existing SONET/SDH, dark fiber or DWDM networks, and ensures the performance of Fibre Channel, ESCON, FICON and Gigabit Ethernet in geographically dispersed business continuance applications. Akara has offices in Ottawa, Ontario and Dallas, Texas. Visit Akara online at www.akara.com.

Contact: Elaine Bird of Akara, 613-270-9500x5022, ebird@akara.com.