EqualLogic Strengthens Position as Leading Midrange iSCSI SAN Provider for Retail Market.

Retailers such as Patagonia, Party America and ZOOTS Use iSCSI SANs from EqualLogic To Meet Growing Storage Needs

NASHUA, N.H. -- EqualLogic(r), the leading provider of enterprise-class iSCSI storage area network (SAN) solutions, today announced growing momentum in the retail industry with several new customers. EqualLogic's affordable and easy-to-use PS Series storage arrays support retailers' demanding environments that include the challenges of automated inventory tracking, supporting dispersed users and an increasing volume of customer-related data. A few of EqualLogic's newest retail customers include Party America, Patagonia, ZOOTS, Inc., Chicago Office Technology Group and Office Environments of New England.

Retailers have found EqualLogic's flexible PS Series SANs to be an ideal fit for their traditional or virtualized IT environments. The company's technology gives retailers uninterrupted data access in a self-managing, all-inclusive storage solution, allowing these organizations to concentrate on their customers and not their day-to-day storage management. Additionally, the high transaction rates retailers support on their databases and SANs requires the performance and reliability that the PS Series delivers. Included in all EqualLogic SANs are 24/7 backup and disaster recovery capabilities via snapshots and Auto-Replication to enable business continuity that is vital to retailers.

Patagonia, a leading manufacturer of outdoor clothing and technical apparel, migrated to an EqualLogic iSCSI SAN to consolidate a disparate set of direct attached storage (DAS) and simplify management and backup of the storage supporting its critical business services including supply chain and product lifecycle management. Since implementing the EqualLogic SAN, Patagonia has transitioned from tape backup to a disk-based backup method, cutting administration times. "Our deployment of EqualLogic has been what was promised: short configuration times, up and running in minutes and exceptional ease-of-use and management capabilities that help us grow our storage networks as needed," said Tammy Barrett, network engineer at Patagonia. "The EqualLogic solution provides our IT team with a level of storage network flexibility and management that we never experienced with DAS. We can now implement IT initiatives that were previously impossible due to complexity and cost issues."

Founded in 1998, ZOOTS is the largest dry cleaner on the East Coast, with 75 locations spanning nine states. The company's rapid growth-in stores and customers-pushed the ZOOTS IT staff to seek replacements for its hard-to-manage Fibre-Channel SAN. ZOOTS selected EqualLogic's storage arrays so it could more easily grow its storage to keep pace with the business expansion, and so staff could spend less time managing their SAN and more time supporting their more than 300,000 customers. "We are dedicated to providing the highest levels of quality and convenience for our 300,000 active customers. We needed to implement a solution that would grow with our company, meet IT budgets and increase availability of data for our users," said Dean Patterson, vice president of IT for ZOOTS, Inc. "EqualLogic's cost-effective, plug-and-play storage solution met our scalability and cost requirements, and continues to protect our mission-critical operations as we multiply in size."

Nationwide party supplies provider Party America selected EqualLogic to overcome I/O bottleneck limitations it encountered with its previous Fibre Channel SAN. In performance benchmarking, Party America discovered EqualLogic's iSCSI storage array delivered at least a 3x improvement in performance over the Fibre Channel predecessor for its Oracle systems. Party America's PS Series implementation exceeds the company's support needs for its bi-coastal, 1,000-plus concurrent user IT environment. "Party America has gone from the smallest party supply retailer to the second largest in the country, operating in 45 states across the U.S.," said Chris Fairbourne, director of IT operations at Party America. "As a large retailer, we have a substantial Oracle database that supports a real-time point of sale system, hosted via broadband links. We needed a SAN for this environment that could scale at a price point we desired. There's nothing else out there like EqualLogic. It's bullet proof. The fault-tolerance, flexibility and performance combined are unmatched. The box integrates flawlessly at all layers-better than anything I've seen."

"IT departments at retailers want to focus on ensuring optimal services for their customers, but are frequently distracted from this priority by storage management challenges," said John Joseph, vice president of marketing at EqualLogic. "Retailers' database-intensive applications are mission critical for processing customer transactions and demand high performance, while their data storage requirements often grow rapidly. EqualLogic is uniquely able to deliver a high-performance, self-managing and scalable SAN that helps retailers free up IT staff, time and money for customer-service oriented priorities."

Success stories on more EqualLogic customers can be found at http://www.equallogic.com/customers.

About EqualLogic

EqualLogic(r), Inc., is the leading provider of intelligent, enterprise-class iSCSI storage area network (SAN) solutions that enable businesses - from Fortune 100 to small and mid-size organizations in more than 30 countries worldwide - to realize the benefits of consolidated, self-managing storage. The EqualLogic PS Series of storage arrays, based on the company's patented peer storage architecture, is the industry's first automatic storage platform that delivers operational simplicity, comprehensive data management services and high data availability in a single, scalable pool of storage. EqualLogic's headquarters are located in Nashua, New Hampshire. For more information, please visit http://www.equallogic.com.

EqualLogic is a registered trademark of EqualLogic, Inc. Other marks belong to their respective owners.