Candera Closes $12 Million in Funding; Funding Demonstrates Strong Support for Enterprise-Class ATA Solution Enabling Low-Cost Tiered Storage.

Business Editors

MILPITAS, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 18, 2004

Candera(TM), Inc., a company dedicated to simplifying the implementation of tiered storage environments by bringing intelligence into the network, today announced it has secured an additional $12 million in funding from new and existing investors. New investors Athenian Venture Partners and Fort Washington joined the major current venture capital investors -- AsiaTech Management, Dali Hook Partners, Hotung Group, New Enterprise Associates, Redpoint Ventures and Venture Strategy Partners, bringing the total investment in Candera to $59 million to date.

"Candera is one of the only companies we've seen that allows highly reliable tiered storage to be deployed using low-cost ATA disks," said Mitchell Rosich, partner at Athenian Venture Partners. "The combination of Candera's enterprise-class SCE 510 network storage controller with commodity Serial ATA (SATA) drives, enables customers to deploy a new tier of high capacity, highly reliable storage at an unprecedented price point. We think Candera's innovation and foresight solves a significant problem in the storage market today."

The funding will be used to expand Candera's growing presence in the SAN market, and to further accelerate the rapid success experienced over the last few quarters. Specifically, Candera will increase its sales and marketing activities, and continue the development of its innovative product offerings, which combines the manageability and high reliability of an enterprise-class network storage controller with the low cost and high capacity of Serial ATA arrays.

The Growing Demand for Tiered Storage

Fortune 2000 enterprises today are faced with a growing need to quickly deploy and easily manage tiers of storage to match the storage and business importance of their data. While they may choose expensive monolithic storage arrays for primary storage of database, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) applications; enterprises increasingly want to conserve money and resources by using low-cost ATA disks for primary storage of second-tier business applications, such as engineering, email, fixed content and other Internet applications; and for secondary storage environments, such as backup and archive. However, ATA deployment has been limited due to the implementation complexity and the immature technology of current ATA solutions.

Addressing the growing need for tiered storage, only Candera has made ATA practical as a highly reliable, easy to deploy, flexible low-cost storage tier with the first off-the-shelf, enterprise-class ATA solution called the Candera ATA Appliance. The appliance deploys storage in seconds and is priced up to 50 percent less than other competitive ATA solutions. Moreover, with a software upgrade, the Candera ATA appliance can be upgraded to Candera's innovative SCE 510 network storage controller that enables enterprises to easily manage the entire storage area network made up of heterogeneous pools of arrays -- both Fibre Channel and ATA.

"Successful companies take a customer-driven approach to selling products," said Allen Beasley, partner at Redpoint Ventures. "Candera's new ATA appliance, combined with its growing list of strategic partners, proves that the company can respond quickly to emerging customer needs and market demands. This is a unique advantage of high-quality venture-backed companies, and a recipe for success in the lucrative ATA market."

Candera is also continuing to expand its customer base and just last month announced that Oxygen Media -- a 24-hour cable television network with original series by Oprah Winfrey, Isaac Mizrahi and Carrie Fisher -- is using its SCE 510 cluster. The cluster is combined with ATA RAID storage to provide the primary storage for its critical nonlinear digital editing environment.

"Candera's recent success, and this significant showing of support from our investors, makes this an exciting time for our company," said S. "Sundi" Sundaresh, president and CEO of Candera. "With this new infusion of capital, we are confident that we can extend our technology leadership, and at the same time continue to deliver the products needed by our growing list of Fortune 2000 customers."

About Candera

Candera, Inc. is dedicated to simplifying the implementation of tiered storage environments by bringing intelligence into the network.. The company's innovative Candera SCE 510 network storage controller was the first product in the industry to move intelligence into the network, allowing enterprises to centrally manage tiered pools of heterogeneous Fibre Channel or ATA storage with high reliability. The Candera SCE 510 controller combined with low-cost ATA disks is available in a product called the Candera ATA Appliance, the first product to make ATA practical as a highly reliable, easy to deploy, flexible low-cost storage tier. Candera's solutions have been chosen by various Fortune 2000 customers, representing the manufacturing, government, and digital media and entertainment industries. For more information about Candera, please visit www.candera.com.

Candera and the Candera logo are trademarks of Candera Inc. All other trademarks and product names are the property of their respective owners.