FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

iQstor Releases iQ1000 Storage System, Delivers Highly Scalable, Automated SAN Solutions for Small to Mid-Sized Businesses

New Fibre Channel Storage Solution Delivers Integrated
Enterprise Level Functionality at a Cost Efficient Price Point

Newbury Park, Calif. – May 12, 2003 – iQstor Networks, Inc., developer of integrated Fibre Channel Storage Area Network (SAN) solutions, announced the general availability release of their iQ1000 Storage System, developed to deliver automated SAN solutions with enterprise-level features for small to mid-sized businesses (SMBs) at a cost-effective price point.

The iQ1000 Storage System delivers a wide range of enterprise level data service features including storage virtualization, snapshot, mirroring, remote replication, and policy-based storage provisioning affordable for the small and mid-size market, enabling storage administrators to benefit from greater ease of integration and improved cost-efficiencies as they manage their storage growth requirements.

“The small and mid-size market segment is underserved by existing storage solutions, and with the iQ1000 we will provide a compelling answer to those businesses that need an enterprise level solution in today’s economy,” Jason Lo, president and CEO, iQstor Networks, said. “The iQ1000 will allow many of the small and mid-size companies to build larger, more flexible and more cost-effective enterprise-level storage area networks, and the integrated and automated iQ1000 storage solutions will allow IT professionals to simply deploy powerful and optimized network infrastructures for competitive advantage.”

The new Fibre Channel iQ1000 Storage System provides an intelligent storage building block of 15 drives in a 3U rackmount form factor, scaling up to 120 drives (17.5 TB) supported per storage subsystem. Ensuring high availability by utilizing fully redundant, hot swappable components for disk drives, power supplies, cooling modules and storage system components, the iQ1000 also features dual active SP100 storage processors with transparent fail-over support to further increase availability. Integrated RAID level (0, 1, 3, 5 and 1+0) provides data protection and helps keep business critical applications running. The iQ1000 subsystem supports four host connections and 2 FC-AL disk loops at 2Gb/second, and provides centralized administration to increase productivity and reduce costs.

Enterprise level data service features provided by the iQ1000 Storage System include:

• Storage Virtualization Services (SVS) to consolidate storage resources, reduce complexity, increase ease-of-use and reduce total cost of ownership (TCO)
• Managed Snapshot Services (MSS) to improve disaster recovery and increase data availability
• Remote Replication Services (RRS) for off-site replication for enhanced business continuity, server-less data migration facility between heterogeneous storage subsystems, and the ability to access mission-critical applications immediately after a primary site disaster
• Intelligent Capacity Management (ICM) for policy based storage provisioning and expansion, enabling file system growth
• Data Backup Services (DBS) with snapshot and mirroring for improved disaster recovery

“iQstor’s storage solution is the first product on the market that addresses the needs of small to mid-sized businesses by eliminating storage complexity,” Marc Staimer, president, Dragon Slayer Consulting, said. “This means that the small and mid-size market can now focus on managing their business and not their storage.”

iQstor has embedded storage management and data services into the storage processors, allowing their SAN solutions to reduce the workload of storage administrators at small and mid-size enterprises and optimize their storage resources, increasing productivity and reducing operating costs.

“As an educational institution, we need to ensure that our data is secure and highly available under all circumstances,” Sam Young, director, computer information services, La Sierra University, said. “We’ve deployed an iQ1000 Storage System to deal with our growing IT needs, and its ease-of-use, scalability and affordability has allowed us to address our IT and budgetary requirements in a smart and very effective way.”

Availability

iQstor’s iQ1000 Storage System is released to general availability on May 12, 2003 and is available through reseller channel partners. iQ1000 pricing starts from $25,200.

About iQstor Networks, Inc.

A privately held company, Newbury Park, CA-based iQstor launched in January 2002. The company's core management team possesses more than 50+ collective years storage industry expertise in engineering, product development, global management and marketing. The iQstor vision is to embed expertise into the storage subsystem that significantly reduces the workload of storage administrators in small and mid-size environments. These automated tools can manage ever-increasing amounts of data as well as the different storage policies that each company maintains. The ultimate goal is storage that is intuitive to use and scales without disruption. For more information on iQstor, visit the company's web site at www.iqstor.com.