Crosswalk Announces General Availability of iGrid(TM) Intelligent Storage Grid System; Center for High Performance Computing at the University of Utah Sees Immediate Performance, Scalability and Reliability Benefits from iGrid.

WESTMINSTER, Colo. -- Crosswalk, Inc., a provider of high-performance technologies that enable non-disruptive, scalable and resilient collaborative computing, today announced general availability of the iGrid Intelligent Storage Grid System. iGrid enables users to concurrently access any data they need for collaborative projects by delivering seamless connectivity between applications, storage resources and file systems. The technology also offers a single view of the entire storage environment, which, combined with a policy-driven architecture, dramatically simplifies what were previously complex and time-consuming management tasks.

Available today, the first release of the iGrid Intelligent Storage Grid System, the iGrid 5100 Series, supports from two to eight nodes and is architected to support up to 256 nodes in the future. Each node has from eight to 12 Gigabit Ethernet front-end network interfaces and eight back-end Fibre Channel ports. Unlike other offerings in this market, iGrid has no requirement for host agents and operates seamlessly with NFS and CIFS protocols.

The Center for High Performance Computing (CHPC) at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City is one of the first educational institutions to deploy an iGrid Intelligent Storage Grid System.

Brian Haymore, lead computing cluster administrator at the CHPC, explained why: "iGrid creates a single system view of our entire storage environment, enables us to non-disruptively scale storage resources and lets us seamlessly integrate these resources no matter what vendors' products are involved. As a result, we can provide computing services and storage capacity on a shared basis, enable collaboration across project teams and allow researchers to concentrate on their work instead of their storage problems. In addition, we have been able to cut the boot time of our entire 605 node cluster by over 80 percent."

iGrid transparently integrates with existing infrastructures, enables collaboration and boosts the scalability and flexibility of the entire IT environment. Each iGrid node can access all file systems and all storage resources in parallel and can scale dynamically and non-disruptively as more applications, servers or storage resources are needed. Additionally, multiple iGrid nodes operate together as a single cohesive system enabling, for the first time, seamless connectivity between the isolated data silos created by earlier storage architectures. As a result, costly and time-consuming data migrations are eliminated.

"The HPC market has presented a variety of unique challenges to the storage industry -- all of which have largely gone unanswered," said Jack McDonnell, Crosswalk's founder and CEO. "Leading HPC users like the University of Utah's CHPC are quickly realizing that iGrid directly addresses their storage challenges of flexibility, scalability and resiliency through a truly unique architecture."

For more information on iGrid, please visit www.crosswalkinc.com or call 866-626-5784.

About Crosswalk, Inc.

Founded in 2003, Crosswalk is a user-focused innovator, designing, manufacturing, and marketing high performance technology solutions that add flexibility and breathe new life into legacy IT infrastructures. Crosswalk's solutions empower network and computational grid users, applications and storage resources to interact as they should -- organically, vendor agnostically, resiliently, scalably and freed from the bounds of convention. For more information, visit www.crosswalkinc.com.