Acopia Networks Ships First Adaptive Resource Switches to Access, Manage and Optimize Unstructured Data Across Heterogeneous, Global Systems.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

LOWELL, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 14, 2004

Merrill Lynch, Warner Music

Lead the List of Fortune 500 Users of Adaptive Infrastructure

Acopia Networks, the innovator of Adaptive Resource Networking, today introduced the industry's first high performance switching platforms that enable enterprises to globally access, manage and optimize unstructured data while better utilizing their existing server and storage infrastructures. The new products, the ARX6000 and ARX1000, couple sophisticated client presentation and storage utilization capabilities with powerful enterprise-wide file distribution to transform today's data centers into "on-demand" resources for global applications. The Acopia products are being deployed by leading enterprise organizations including Merrill Lynch and Warner Music.

Based on Adaptive Resource Networking technology, Acopia's products are purpose-built to leverage standard IP networks to provide global scale. The standards-based ARX switches work across the heterogeneous, multi-vendor systems already in use today, and require no additional software to be installed on the client desktops or storage systems. In addition, the new products employ sophisticated policy-enforcement technology which dynamically manages the placement and migration of data, thereby significantly reducing capital and operational expenses in the data center and throughout all remote sites.

"Managing unstructured data, and its associated IT infrastructure, is clearly one of the most daunting tasks for CIOs in large enterprises today," said Christopher Lynch, President and CEO of Acopia. "Our customers report that up to 85 percent of their business information exists as unstructured file data, and most of their initiatives to virtualize the infrastructure, and improve the capital and operational costs, don't apply to this unstructured data. Our Adaptive Resource Switches are designed specifically to solve this problem, regardless of whether that data resides in the next room or across the world."

Steve Duplessie, Founder and Sr. Analyst, Enterprise Storage Group, added, "As unstructured data balloons to such a large proportion of all data stored in enterprises today, CIOs are being forced to manage it as part of the data center infrastructure, not just as content. Existing approaches aren't well suited to handle the breadth and scale of files that exist within many enterprises today. Acopia's ARX products are the most innovative technology we've seen that address the significant challenges of unstructured data on a global scale."

Merrill Lynch and Warner Music Deploying New Adaptive Resource Switches

Merrill Lynch, Warner Music and other enterprises with large, global data center infrastructures plan to deploy the new ARX switches as part of their broad adaptive infrastructure initiatives. The applications within these initiatives include server consolidation, global namespace for clients, data life cycle management, data migration to classes of storage, capacity balancing and enterprise-wide file services.

"Merrill Lynch plans to move to an adaptive IT infrastructure to consolidate its worldwide data centers and reduce its total cost of ownership," said Andy Brown, chief technology architect at Merrill Lynch. "Acopia's Adaptive Resource Switches enable this transformation by consolidating the back-end data store while providing global data access to users without disruption. Its network-based approach enables the use of best-in-class file systems, eliminates costly desktop re-configurations, and automatically migrates data without manual intervention or costly application disruption."

Simplifying Client Presentation

Unstructured data typically is stored across a variety of network-attached storage servers that are uniquely mapped to clients and are difficult to centrally manage. Today's users must navigate a maze of mapped drives or mount points for file data that is logically related but is distributed across distinct physical servers. As new file servers are added user mount points grow while changes to the server infrastructure requires user downtime and re-configuration.

Acopia's ARX products enable the aggregation of multi-vendor file storage into a logical pool that is presented as a single access point, often called a global namespace. In addition, the products virtualize the file storage infrastructure, transparently mapping client requests to the appropriate storage resources. This allows users to always have a global view of data, irrespective of location or system dependencies, and means that there is no disruption to users with adds/moves or changes to back-end storage devices. Acopia's customers report that this simplified client presentation will reduce the operational cost of managing their desktops by 50% or more.

Improving Storage Utilization and Management

The ARX products consolidate heterogeneous, distributed islands of file storage into a unified global storage pool, reclaiming stranded capacity and employing intelligent policies to better optimize costly storage resources. For example, files/directories migrate from a resource with limited free space to one with available free space without application disruption. Acopia's customers report that this utilization improvement is as much as 30% or more, providing substantial capital expenditure improvement.

Storage "classes" can also be defined to economically manage data commensurate with its value to the organization, enabling the infrastructure to adopt data lifecycle management characteristics. Acopia's ARX products dynamically migrate data to appropriate classes of storage, thereby freeing up costly high-end storage resources/capacity within existing systems, and providing alternative storage purchasing options.

Expanding Services Globally with Data Distribution

Acopia's ARX products, when interconnected, scale to a global level, providing an on-demand infrastructure across the enterprise. This allows users and applications to transparently access data regardless of the physical location of storage resources, while automatically optimizing the placement of data to improve the performance of applications. This intelligent data distribution capability also enables enterprises to improve backup/recovery processes, disaster recovery mechanisms, and to reduce the amount of data duplication that occurs today.

Family of Products

The ARX family includes two models - the high-end ARX6000 and the fixed configuration ARX1000. The ARX6000, which lists for $150,000, is a very high capacity system designed to enable high performance access to an infrastructure of over 500 million files per switch. The ARX1000, which lists for $45,000, is designed for capacities of 100M files per switch. The products are built on a common software base and support the same features. Both models are immediately available.

About Acopia Networks

Acopia Networks, headquartered in Lowell, MA, is the innovator of Adaptive Resource Networking platforms that provide a new foundation for intelligently managing the global distribution of data. Acopia's switches hide the "back end" complexity from users and increase the utilization of today's resources. The company was founded in 2002 by industry visionary and serial entrepreneur Cheng Wu and a team of talented engineers from companies such as Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO), EMC (NYSE: EMC), Network Appliance (NASDAQ: NTAP) and others throughout the high technology industry.

For more information, visit http://www.acopia.com/.

2004 Acopia Networks, Inc. Acopia is a trademark of Acopia Networks. All other brands, products, or service names may be trademarks or service marks of the companies with which they are associated.