ExaGrid Systems Expands Direct and Indirect Sales Channels; Industry's First Self-Protecting Storage Solution Gains Significant Market Traction

Business Wire, March 1, 2005

WESTBOROUGH, Mass. -- ExaGrid Systems, innovators in Self-Protecting Storage, today announced the expansion of the company's direct and indirect sales channels. Resellers Bishop Technologies, Inc. and Tri-Delta Resources have been signed and ColoSpace - a managed service provider - is already leveraging ExaGrid's Advanstor(TM) solution to store the data of more than a dozen ColoSpace customers. Advanstor has been cited as an optimal solution to offer midsized organizations who want to reduce the cost and complexity associated with storage and data protection.

ExaGrid additionally announced expansion of its direct sales force into the Midwest, New York, Texas and California regions.

Advanstor is a fully-integrated, self-managing/healing solution that provides primary storage, local/remote backup and restore, rapid disaster recovery, two-tiered storage with automated data migration, and long-term data preservation.

"Ensuring effective data protection and disaster recovery is critical to all organizations, regardless of size," said Mark Kaufman, president and CEO of ExaGrid Systems. "As we ramp up our sales operations, we want to ensure that we reach the broad base of midsized companies struggling with the costs and complexity of ensuring their data is protected. Early customer feedback shows 5x productivity improvements, dramatic cost reductions, and even data compression improvements as high as 100-fold. We look forward to continuing our sales expansion and to working closely with Bishop, Tri-Delta Resources and ColoSpace."

Bishop is a provider of solutions that ensure the proper management and retention of corporate messaging content - particularly in line with meeting regulatory compliance. Bishop will be offering Advanstor as a robust foundation for long-term data preservation/archiving, and is assisting in the certification process of Advanstor with various email archiving and compliance software products, such as ZANTAZ EAS.

Tri-Delta Resources is a leader in providing integrated hardware solutions to the IBM midrange and networking environments and is the largest third-party provider of hardware maintenance to the midrange community in New York State. Tri-Delta is a Microsoft Solutions Provider and will resell Advanstor to customers looking to cost effectively expand protection capabilities for file-based data in Windows environments.

ColoSpace is a leading provider of Colocation and Dedicated Server Hosting in the Northeast and is ExaGrid's first managed service provider customer. Colocation is a form of outsourcing and ColoSpace provides customers with carrier-grade facilities to store their data and equipment off-site in a secure environment and still retain 24/7 access. ColoSpace is already successfully storing data of more than a dozen customers using Advanstor.

With data still growing in excess of 100 percent per year and regulatory requirements demanding long-term data preservation, market research analysts are predicting that midsized businesses in 2005 will be looking for more integrated, "holistic" solutions that include backup and recovery functions, as well as more effective storage management.

A New Business Reality Demands a New Approach

Increasing security threats, regulatory compliance and competitive agility drive the need for data management and protection, combined with escalating amounts of data that has to be stored. Storage administrators must select, install, configure and manage dozens of independent storage, backup, archiving and replication products, as well as management tools to adequately store and protect data. With all of these disjointed and distributed devices and software, midsized organizations face high levels of complexity, cost and redundancy, prompting many to implement partial protection, and even eschew functions like disaster recovery.

Advanstor drastically changes the storage and data protection equation. Advances in disk technology/performance and component cost reductions have commoditized storage hardware. With an innovative and patent-pending software architecture, Advanstor leverages virtualization, advanced data management techniques and grid computing concepts to pool commodity NAS and SATA-based servers. Automated data movement is enabled based on a single, user-defined policy, and traditional data storage applications - including backup/restore, disaster recovery and hierarchical storage management - are distributed across a system environment. With this integrated approach, the need for separate dedicated hardware/software products no longer exists.

Advanstor drives the costs associated with traditional protection approaches down by as much as 50 percent in the first year, and as much as 80 percent in subsequent years. The value of Advanstor lies in its ability to ensure:

--Storage and protection - primary NAS with automated data migration; continuous onsite/offsite backup and distributed site protection in a two-tiered solution

--Data availability - fast and ultra-reliable restores, fast site disaster recovery and automated file integrity assurance