Crosswalk, Inc. Introduces the Most Comprehensive Backup Reporting Tool; New Crosswalk Storage Manager (CSM) Bundle Provides Backup Relief With Single View of Entire Backup Environment.

WESTMINSTER, Colo. -- Crosswalk, Inc., a company creating a suite of products that begins to solve the complexity of the information infrastructure, today announced the Crosswalk Storage Manager Backup Bundle. The new bundle allows IT professionals to monitor their existing backup environment in a single pane. Available as a pre-packaged configuration of the Crosswalk Storage Manager (CSM) software suite, the bundle delivers customized monitoring and reporting of the largest set of backup vendors currently available.

As the complexity of backup environments has grown, most organizations are not successfully completing nightly backups within their desired windows. A study by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) found that of 228 respondents, an astounding 36 percent said that their biggest problem was the uncertainty of whether they were adequately backing up their data.(1) These statistics confirm that many administrators lack adequate monitoring and reporting tools to detect and isolate risks.

"Many IT environments have multiple backup systems but no centralized, common reporting tool, making it difficult to get useful data that enables the IT administrator to meet today's business and regulatory demands with confidence," stated Rob Kelley, founder and CTO of Crosswalk. "Research has shown that up to 50 percent of mid-sized and large companies utilize multiple backup vendors. Typically, this is due to the painful process of converting from one backup system to another. However, because of this, many organizations are not fully aware of the root cause or extent of the backup problems they face."

The Crosswalk CSM Backup Bundle allows organizations to maximize their existing investment in backup tools, while receiving additional knowledge that helps meet service level agreements (SLAs), regulatory requirements and the constant pressure to increase productivity with a powerful view into the entire environment. Key benefits of the bundle include:

--Clear graphical representation of the entire backup environment

--Reporting on the success and failure of the backup applications

--Aggregation of multiple backup applications and/or vendors

--Clear mapping of host drives to backup application

--Easy mapping of backup hosts to hosts not under backup

About the CSM Backup Bundle

The CSM Backup bundle allows IT personnel to monitor their existing backup environment without the hassle of maintaining manual efforts, such as the use of clipboards and Excel(TM), and without the need to interpret log files from native backup applications. Additional functionalities of the bundle include:

--Aggregation of reporting, monitoring and event management from multiple copies of existing backup utilities into a single console

--Easy-to-use, intuitive console that provides monitoring, reporting, trending and graphical analysis for the management of the entire backup environment

--Performance metrics that allow backup process optimization, including graphical analysis of success percentages, backup amounts and throughput for both media servers and clients

--Trending and forecasting data, enabling a proactive operation and the ability to visualize backup trends enabling resource planning for future investments in business continuity and disaster recovery resources

--Backup event notification, enabling troubleshooting of problems that could jeopardize successful backups

--Integration with most common backup applications, providing investment protection

The Backup Bundle delivers value by allowing better management of critical data, headcount, budget, uptime availability and SLAs. The new bundle provides investment protection by integrating with most common backup applications, including those marketed by Computer Associates, IBM, Legato, Syncsort and Symantec/Veritas. The new bundle is available immediately and starts at less than $10,000.

Crosswalk's CSM software suite provides a wide range of solutions for storage and data management. By creating bundles, Crosswalk is providing relief to specific user pain points. The NAS Bundle, launched in October 2005, delivers customized monitoring and reporting of multiple distributed NAS systems. Regardless of device manufacturer, the CSM NAS Bundle provides visibility into both the storage environment and the complete IT infrastructure from a single console.

ABOUT CROSSWALK INC.

Crosswalk is creating a suite of products and a company that begins to solve the complexity of the current information infrastructure, providing dramatically improved information access across networks. Founded in 2004 by Chairman and CEO Jack McDonnell, Crosswalk has a team that includes veterans from McDATA, Cisco, EMC, Veritas, Sun Microsystems and other leading technology companies. For more information, visit www.crosswalkinc.com.

(1) Enterprise Storage Group Brief -- "The Evolution of Enterprise Data Protection: End User Adoption of Next-Generation Backup and Recovery Technologies," John McKnight, January 2004