Lightsand Communications Reaches Record Distance of 500km for Storage Connectivity Solution - Awarded Multiple IBM Certifications.

PLANO, Texas -- LightSand(R) Communications, Inc., a company pioneering SAN Connectivity solutions, announced today that it is providing the interconnectivity solution supporting the successful deployment over 500 km of mission critical architectures implemented by IBM BCRS for several of its customers in Portugal.

The business needs, as identified by IBM, are driven by the fact that Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery practices and regulations require that companies maintain a copy of their business critical application data at a remote location. The solutions deployed by IBM in this case involve disk mirroring to provide the highest availability solution for protecting information, remote backup, and FICON channel extension over MAN/WAN between different cities. The LightSand i-8100A SAN extension gateway with its SAN Routing and Isolation capabilities using AR/DAT, and the i-7100F FICON extension gateway, were used to provide the distant connectivity without performance degradation.

"This deployment is a landmark in the development of LightSand for several key reasons. It demonstrates our ability to simplify long distance solutions in highly demanding and complex environments such as those encountered by IBM BCRS. It clearly shows our capacity to deliver outstanding performance in the interconnection of distant sites in multi-system environments, regardless of distance. It illustrates our unique functionalities to interconnect distant SANs without Fabric merges and it enables any local Data-protection applications to use seamlessly remote storage resources over any WAN. Our ability to interconnect different SAN Fabric vendors between multiple sites without SANs merge is lowering the implementation costs of DR applications in heterogeneous customer production environment, said Richard Czech, CEO of LightSand. Furthermore, we are delighted that these achievements were recognized through the obtention of several IBM certifications based on actual customer production environments."

On the basis of this successful deployment, LightSand solutions received multiple IBM TotalStorage Proven, IBM System Storage Proven and IBM Total Server Proven certifications. The specific environments tested were as follows:

--XRC in Multi-system environment (ESS-800, DS-8300, HDS) with LightSand i-7100F FICON extension gateways

-- XRC for ESS-800 with LightSand i-7100F FICON extension gateways

--xSeries DiskCopy FAStT-600 (DS-4300) with LightSand SAN extension gateways

--zSeries DiskCopy for DS-8300 over MAN/WAN with LightSand FICON extension gateways

--xSeries Remote Tape Backup LTO with LightSand SAN extension gateways

--iSeries Remote Tape Backup LTO with LightSand SAN extension gateways

The full overview of LightSand Products and Solutions is available at www.lightsand.com

About LightSand

LightSand offers a variety of products for increasing SAN connectivity, both within the data center and over MAN/WAN networks. LightSand SAN extension gateways connect FICON or Fibre Channel with Ethernet Layer 2 over distance using IP, SONET/SDH, DWDM and dedicated fiber. The company's revolutionary AR/DAT technology allows these gateways to function as FC routers, enabling the segmentation of SANs into autonomous regions, and providing reliable interconnections between heterogeneous multi-vendor SAN fabrics. LightSand is a privately held company headquartered in Plano, TX. For more information visit www.lightsand.com

IBM, IBM BCRS, IBM TotalStorage Proven, IBM Storage System Proven and IBM Server Proven are registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation.