ACADEMIA

MINNEAPOLIS, MN -- Sistina Software, a pioneer and leader of file system and volume infrastructure software for networked storage, announced today the appointment of Joaquin Ruiz as Vice President of Marketing and Product Management. Ruiz brings to Sistina over 10 years of highly successful marketing and product definition experience, including an extremely strong track record in the enterprise storage and clustering industries. Ruiz reports to Sistina’s CEO, Frank Crusing, effective immediately. “We are very pleased that Joaquin has joined Sistina,” said Frank Crusing, Sistina’s President and CEO. “The depth of storage marketing experience he brings, and his record of success measured in product revenue growth, partnership traction and awareness generation in the storage industry, adds a crucial dimension to our management team and strengthens the company as a whole.” Most recently Ruiz was a driving force at Nishan Systems, the industry’s leading gigabit-speed TCP/IP – Fibre Channel hybrid storage switching platform vendor. As one of the company’s first employees, Ruiz helped with driving several critical revenue generating partnerships with storage leaders such as Hitachi Data Systems, leading its high profile company launch, and growing the company to over 150 employees. As Director of Product Marketing, Ruiz led the definition and launch of the first two generations of Nishan’s IP Storage switches, culminating in key awards such as Network Magazine 2002 Product of the Year. Prior to Nishan, Ruiz held worldwide marketing group management positions at Hewlett-Packard where he drove HP to the #1 press, analyst and revenue positions for UNIX high-availability clustering software. While at HP, Ruiz and his group successfully initiated and developed multiple partnerships, from strategic alliances such as the ‘5nines’ program with Oracle, Cisco, EMC, BEA, and SAP, to technology partnerships with Veritas, to product alliances with EMC (from which the highly successful HP MetroCluster with EMC SRDF product was born). “I am delighted to join Sistina Software. The storage industry is at its next inflection point. The deployment of storage area networks as well as the increasing adoption of industry- standard server technology mandates the need for scalable, high-performance storage infrastructure software. Sistina’s leadership in file system and volume infrastructure software places it at the forefront of this swell.” Ruiz holds a B.S. degree in Computer Engineering, an M.S. in Electrical Engineering and an MBA from the Wharton School of Business. He has authored several papers on signal processing as well as served on an advisory board for the National Science Foundation. Sistina’s Global File System (GFS) is the leading enterprise-class clustered file system on Linux. Running on economical, yet powerful, commodity hardware, Sistina’s GFS greatly simplifies data management and reduces the total cost of data storage. For more information, visit Sistina on-line at www.sistina.com.