Features - Storage Innovations:

InterSAN ANNOUNCES NEW VERSION OF PATHLINE

InterSAN Inc, a leading provider of storage area management (SAM) automation software, has announced a breakthrough product release -- PATHLINE 2.5, the first and currently the only application to automate and manage all aspects of the storage services life cycle from planning, implementation, and provisioning to monitoring. With this new release, InterSAN extends the range and reach of the PATHLINE software's advanced policy-based automation and storage resource management capabilities to significantly improve IT efficiencies, optimize resource utilization, and reduce the cost of storage management. Using InterSAN PATHLINE 2.5, Global 2000 companies can gain control of their complex, geographically distributed, multi-vendor storage resources and provide quality service in an affordable, manageable, and secure environment. In a companion news release, Fidelity Investments, one of the world's largest providers of financial services, announced that it has deployed PATHLINE as its SAM solution to manage hundreds of terabytes of data in multiple data centers. By leveraging PATHLINE to automate day-to-day storage service processes, Fidelity will seek a significant reduction in its total cost of ownership for storage while maintaining outstanding service levels.

"PATHLINE 2.5 adds substantial planning, implementation, provisioning, and monitoring capabilities that support the storage services life cycle. Global 2000 companies with massive data storage requirements -- such as those in the financial industry -- will find significant value in having a single solution to automate, simplify, optimize, and ensure the reliability of their SAN," said Chris Melville, founder, president and CEO of InterSAN. "Having an industrial-strength storage management solution in the data center is no longer optional for most large organizations, and we are confident that with PATHLINE 2.5, InterSAN will continue to set the benchmark for SAM feature sets and capabilities."

"Stimulated by the emergence of storage networks and high storage growth rates, the systems and storage management industry must embark on a journey toward automating most of the storage administrator's tasks -- perhaps even eventually eliminating the need for such a role. Without automating SAM software, users will be unable to manage storage, and then growth will stall, as it did in the mainframe world in the mid-1980s," said Nick Allen, vice president and research director for Gartner Group.

InterSAN PATHLINE 2.5 Extends Automation Across Storage Services Life Cycle

InterSAN PATHLINE 2.5 is the first unified management and reporting solution for multi-vendor storage environments that automates day-to-day storage service processes across the entire life cycle, from planning, implementation, and provisioning to monitoring. Using patented Virtual Private DataPath technology to provide true application-to-data path management, PATHLINE is the only management solution that allows users to manage storage environments in the context of applications and service-level agreements while applying comprehensive policy-driven automation and resource management to storage operations. By centralizing and automating labor-intensive and error-prone storage tasks from a single console, PATHLINE 2.5 enables customers to significantly reduce staffing costs, capital costs, and application downtime.

PATHLINE 2.5 provides these new automation and resource management capabilities:

• Provisioning workflow management extends the industry's most comprehensive provisioning automation capabilities by enabling IT to fully control the level of automation and timing of each step in the provisioning process, including reserving storage, enabling reserved storage during a change window, and optimizing configuration changes to meet provisioning windows.
• Host file system SRM capabilities automatically discovery file systems and monitor their space utilization, enabling IT to identify under- and over-utilized storage and to trigger storage provisioning based on thresholds in support of capacity-on-demand storage services.
• Policy auditing, an industry first that automatically identifies partial and out-of-compliance storage configurations and enables correction.
• Automated path reconfiguration, an industry first that fully automates the remapping of application-to-data storage paths following SAN reconfiguration activities associated with server consolidation and SAN device upgrades and replacements.
• Charge-back reports and enhanced decision support capabilities, including new utilization reports, service-level compliance reports, top 10 error reports, and easy-to-use custom reporting.
• Path proofing deepens provisioning capabilities, allowing IT to easily review and personalize path and storage selections and perform "what if" provisioning scenarios.
• Subscription-based event management capabilities provide flexible notification of events and alerts at any level from physical to logical. Administrators can sign up to receive notification of relevant events and to receive the notification via email, pager alerts, or SNMP alerts to a network management framework. Scripts can also be automatically executed for self-healing action.

Availability, Pricing and Support

PATHLINE 2.5 is currently available for worldwide distribution through InterSAN and its distribution partner, Hitachi Data Systems; pricing is based on the amount of SAN-attached storage and the diversity of storage networking hardware in the managed environment.

InterSAN provides 24x7 customer support and professional services both directly and through its professional services and distribution partners. InterSAN's Professional Services Partner Program certifies partners to provide customers with a comprehensive suite of high-quality and timely storage area management consulting, implementation, and training services for PATHLINE.

About InterSAN

InterSAN Inc is a leading provider of storage area management automation solutions that deliver storage services excellence, enabling customers to better manage growth and provide quality services in an affordable, manageable, and secure environment. InterSAN's flagship product, PATHLINE, is the industry's first solution to deliver unified management and reporting for multi-vendor storage environments that automates storage service processes from planning to implementation to provisioning to monitoring. Using patented Virtual Private DataPath technology to provide end-to-end path management, the InterSAN PATHLINE solution provides top-down management of storage networks from an application perspective, to improve application availability and service-level management. By centralizing and automating the management of storage networking infrastructure, PATHLINE improves operational efficiency as well as business agility and scalability. PATHLINE was honored as Network Magazine's storage management 2002 Product of the Year, and InterSAN has been included on Byte and Switch's list of Top 10 Privately Held Companies for over 15 months. For more information about InterSAN, call 831-430-0692 or visit www.intersan.net.

Contact: Donna Wiss of Trainer Public Relations, 303-933-0674, or is@trainerpr.com, for InterSAN Inc.