AppIQ Extends Storage Area Management Support to CNT's FC/9000 Director.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

Storage Networking World Spring 2004

PHOENIX--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 5, 2004

AppIQ and CNT Form Technical Alliance to Deliver Integrated

Storage Solutions to Common Customers

AppIQ(TM), Inc., a leading provider of enterprise software that enables data storage to be managed as an IT utility, today announced that its award-winning storage area network (SAN) management and storage resource management (SRM) solution family will support the CNT FC/9000 Fibre Channel/FICON Director. The integration of AppIQ StorageAuthority(TM) Suite with CNT's multi-protocol, enterprise-class director will provide common customers with highly interoperable, standards-based storage software and hardware solutions that simplify storage administration, reduce operational costs, and ensure the availability and performance of business-critical applications.

To ensure solution interoperability, CNT and AppIQ have formed a technical alliance, with AppIQ becoming a certified member of CNT's inVSN(TM) Partner Program. Both companies are also leveraging the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) to ensure that CNT's director can be modeled and managed by AppIQ software according to this industry standard. As a result, AppIQ StorageAuthority Suite will deliver its complete, industry-leading set of discovery, visualization, dependency management, capacity planning, performance monitoring, role-based security, intelligent provisioning, and business application correlation capabilities for the CNT FC/9000 Fibre Channel/FICON Director.

"Our technical alliance with AppIQ is a natural move for CNT, and a direct response to customer demand for management solutions that can reduce the costs of storage administration, while improving business and IT alignment," said Ed Walsh, vice president of Strategy, Marketing, and Alliances, CNT. "Working together will also benefit our common channel partner, Hitachi Data Systems, who can now offer customers AppIQ management software, the CNT FC/900 Director, and Hitachi storage systems that are seamlessly integrated."

AppIQ expects to deliver support for the CNT FC/9000 Fibre Channel/FICON Director in this year's third calendar quarter. Both companies invite customers to preview the integrated solutions at the Interoperability and Solutions Demo at Storage Networking World, April 5-7, 2004 in Phoenix, AZ.

"AppIQ is becoming the dominant storage area management solution on the market, so it is only natural that customers are asking us to support popular storage area network switch and director products from leading vendors like CNT," said Tom Rose, vice president of Marketing, AppIQ. "By collaborating with CNT to ensure storage management interoperability, and by delivering solutions based on the SMI-S, we are able to offer highly scalable, flexible, and manageable solutions that enable enterprises to build a responsive, adaptive storage utility."

About the CNT FC/9000 Fibre Channel/FICON Director

The CNT FC/9000 provides the industry's most powerful platform for migrating storage area networks into true enterprise-class environments. Offering the lowest latency, highest availability, and up to 256 usable ports--the highest port capacity anywhere--the FC/9000 is the most scalable data center-class Fibre Channel and FICON director on the market. The ideal backbone for enterprises with little or no tolerance for down time, it is the only scalable Fibre Channel/FICON director delivering 99.999% ("Five 9's") availability for data-intensive anytime, anywhere operations including shared storage, backup and recovery, server consolidation, e-commerce, data mining, and imaging.

About AppIQ

AppIQ(TM), Inc. is a leading provider of enterprise Storage Area Network (SAN) management and Storage Resource Management (SRM) solutions. AppIQ StorageAuthority(TM) Suite is "Enabling the storage utility"(TM) for today's data-intensive enterprise by seamlessly integrating storage resource visualization, provisioning, monitoring, reporting, and policy-based automation, and by correlating the availability of business-critical applications with SAN configuration, capacity and performance. AppIQ products are sold across all continents directly and through a network of strategic OEMs and resellers. Customers worldwide in almost every industry rely on AppIQ software to reduce operational costs and improve business performance. AppIQ is a privately held company based in Burlington, Mass. For more information, visit http://www.appiq.com.

(C) 2004 AppIQ, Inc. AppIQ, StorageAuthority, and "Enabling the storage utility" are trademarks of AppIQ, Inc. in the United States and in other countries. All other brands or products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders and should be treated as such.