3PAR/ONStor Introduces Utilicat: Industry's First Utility-Class Unified Storage

LOS GATOS and FREMONT, CA, US — September 20, 2005

ONStor Inc., the leader in Enterprise NAS Gateway solutions, and 3PAR®, the leading provider of Utility Storage, announced today the release of UtiliCat™, a new unified storage offering that delivers enterprise-class consolidated SAN and NAS services. Unlike other unified storage approaches that force customers to deploy and manage multiple storage silos, UtiliCat merges the proven technology of ONStor's NAS Gateways and 3PAR's Utility Storage arrays in a dramatically simple and efficient utility computing architecture.

UtiliCat delivers tiered block- and file-level data access and management services — ideal for a broad range of open-systems applications — in a space-efficient, highly expandable form factor. Inside UtiliCat, all disk-based storage resides on a highly scalable 3PAR InServ® Storage Server, which also provides direct access to SAN-based storage for application servers. ONStor's Bobcat™ NAS Gateways provide file services from the same consolidated and re-purposeable capacity pool. Unique enterprise features combine to provide the following unmatched benefits:

"UtiliCat brings together two innovative next-generation storage products into one solution," said Tony Asaro, senior analyst for the Enterprise Strategy Group. "ONStor and 3PAR provide an extremely compelling enterprise-class NAS and SAN offering that is competitive on a number of levels, including scalability, manageability, performance, and reliability. UtiliCat can significantly reduce administrative costs and storage expenditures while providing best-in-class SAN and NAS features and functions. This partnership makes a ton of sense and brings a great deal of value to customers."

UtiliCat features integrated storage and processing virtualization that enhances service levels and increases utilization. With UtiliCat, administrators can deploy resources in a matter of seconds — whenever and wherever they are needed — while simultaneously reducing administration efforts by 90 percent or more. Its advanced virtualization architecture also means customers can achieve high levels of availability and performance while cutting capacity and related costs by up to 75 percent. With their SPECsfs® results, ONStor and 3PAR have already demonstrated leadership, linearly scalable open NAS gateway performance, and disk capacity cost savings of 65 percent with the use of 3PAR Thin Provisioning. Additional ONStor and 3PAR SPECsfs results highlight how, with UtiliCat virtualization, data service levels can be optimized (for example, converting volumes from RAID 1 to RAID 5) simply and on-line, with negligible impact to performance.

"Simplicity, flexibility and cost-effective scalability led us to select UtiliCat for our critical web services," said Nicholas Tang, Director of Operations at Community Connect, Inc. "UtiliCat gave us a unified, highly virtualized environment that simplifies management, boosts uptime, and improves resource utilization."

UtiliCat scales non-disruptively from 2.5 to 384 terabytes, and from one to eight NAS gateways in a single high-availability cluster, and provides non-disruptive rebalancing of up to 400 virtual file systems. SAN controllers scale from two to eight in a single cache-coherent and massively load-balanced cluster, with native SAN connectivity ranging from 4 to 128 Fibre Channel ports. UtiliCat is a certified 3PAR/ONStor solution that is jointly tested and supported.

"With UtiliCat, companies finally have an enterprise-class solution that allows them to deploy unified storage in a manner that is simple, efficient, and scalable," said Bob Miller, CEO of ONStor. "UtiliCat's integrated virtualization and all-inclusive data management abilities enable businesses to deploy a scalable enterprise storage infrastructure for a broad range of applications, providing a needed solution for the marketplace that delivers extreme flexibility and high return on investment."

"UtiliCat delivers scaling without administrative headaches, offers high performance without high costs, and lets customers turn on a dime to meet changing requirements," said David Scott, President and CEO of 3PAR. "Unified storage doesn't need to come in a silo-ed network appliance, and UtiliCat proves it by delivering seamless enterprise-scale growth."

Availability and pricing
UtiliCat is available from ONStor and 3PAR resellers and system integrators worldwide. A complete UtiliCat solution retails from about $175,000. To learn more about UtiliCat, call 877-266-7867.

About ONStor
ONStor is the leader in enterprise-class NAS Gateways that consolidate file services on multi-vendor storage. ONStor storage solutions dramatically reduce management costs by providing customers with the most easily scaled storage environment, and reduce capital costs by delivering the freedom and flexibility of the industry's most interoperable platform. ONStor products and technology are offered by leading system integrators and resellers worldwide. All products are backed by a host of support offerings and by ONStor's uncompromising commitment to customer service. More information about ONStor can be found at www.onstor.com or by calling toll-free 877-2ON-STOR (877-266-7867).

About 3PAR
3PAR® (NYSE Arca: PAR) is the leading global provider of utility storage, a category of highly virtualized, tightly-clustered, and dynamically-tiered storage arrays built for utility computing. Organizations use utility computing to build cost-effective virtualized IT infrastructures for flexible workload consolidation. 3PAR Utility Storage gives customers an alternative to traditional arrays by delivering resilient infrastructure with increased agility at a lower total cost to meet their rapidly changing business needs. As a pioneer of thin provisioning — a green technology developed to address storage underutilization and inefficiencies — 3PAR offers products designed to minimize power consumption and promote environmental responsibility. With 3PAR, customers have reduced the costs of allocated storage capacity, administration, and SAN infrastructure while increasing adaptability and resiliency. 3PAR Utility Storage is built to meet the demands of open systems consolidation, integrated data lifecycle management, and performance-intensive applications.

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3PAR/ONStor Introduces Utilicat: Industry's First Utility-Class Unified Storage

Unique utility computing architecture for unmatched simplicity and efficiency