INDUSTRY

REDWOOD CITY, CA -- Today the Storage Performance Council (SPC), in conjunction with IBM, LSI Logic Storage Systems and Sun Microsystems, announce initial results for SPC Benchmark 1(TM) (SPC-1), the first industry-standard benchmark for enterprise storage systems. These SPC member companies are simultaneously announcing the initial SPC-1 results to visibly demonstrate their support for the ground-breaking achievements and contributions made by the SPC to the storage industry and its customers. This new benchmark specification and its results, for the first time, give customers a clearly applicable, vendor-neutral process to accurately compare and configure direct attach or network storage technology. "IBM is committed to supporting common standards and tools that help customers make educated storage systems purchasing decisions based on performance comparisons that are objective and vendor neutral," said Walter Raizner, general manager of storage products for IBM. "The initial SPC benchmark results released today demonstrate the impressive performance, scalability and versatility that the TotalStorage Enterprise Storage Server can deliver in the most demanding storage networking environments." "We have long awaited an industry-standard vendor-neutral benchmark that provides storage customers with an effective way of comparing competing storage products," said Flavio Santoni, vice president of sales and marketing, LSI Logic Storage Systems, Inc. "We're proud to be a founding member of the Storage Performance Council and have eagerly looked forward to participating in the first round of testing for this important industry milestone. We are gratified that the first round of SPC-1 testing has validated LSI Logic Storage Systems as a performance and price/performance leader in the storage industry." "Sun Microsystems is pleased to support industry standards by participating in producing this ground-breaking SPC-1 benchmark result," said Rhonda Holt, vice president of engineering, Sun Microsystems, Network Storage. "The Sun StorEdge 9910 system is a data center class storage system that provides maximum levels of availability, scalability, and, as demonstrated by the results of this benchmark, extreme bandwidth due to its switched-fabric architecture. Producing an SPC-1 IOPS rate of 8,404.22 and an SPC-1 LRT of 2.07ms using only 640 GBytes of configured storage capacity," Holt continued, "the Sun StorEdge 9910 system configuration used RAID-1 data protection with VERITAS Volume Manager Software." "All the members of the SPC have made an unbelievable contribution of resources and expertise over the past five years to ensure that comparable and complete performance results start flowing to end-users, the press and the analyst community," said Leah Schoeb, chairman of the SPC and staff engineer at Sun Microsystems. "Ultimately, the revolution started by these first results will benefit both producers and consumers of enterprise storage products." "We are very excited about the SPC's promotion and dissemination of objective and verifiable performance data. This information will be a great benefit to our industry," said Chuck Standerfer, Senior Partner of Evaluator Group. "Evaluator Group is proud to be a member of the SPC, and honored that we were selected as a preferred analyst. Summaries of the benchmark results, as well as our analysis and opinions, will be available on our Web site at www.evaluatorgroup.com." "Ideas International is a recognized authority on industry benchmarking and has been pleased to be a sponsor of the SPC from its beginning," said Ian Birks, chief executive officer of Ideas International. "We can attest to the quality and completeness that has gone into ensuring that the SPC's mission will be successfully fulfilled. A complete summary of SPC benchmark results and developments is available on our Web site at www.ideasinternational.com." Full-disclosure reports of the initial benchmark results will be available on the SPC's Web site, www.storageperformance.org, beginning May 6. The Storage Performance Council The SPC is a non-profit corporation founded to define, standardize and promote storage system benchmarks and to disseminate objective, verifiable performance data to the computer industry and its customers. The SPC is the only industry standards organization that defines and promotes storage benchmarks as well as disseminates objective, relevant and verifiable performance data and related test tools to the computer industry and its customers. Its members include Adaptec, Compaq, Dell, Evaluator Group, Hitachi, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Ideas International, LSI Logic Storage Systems, NEC, Sun Microsystems, Unisys and VERITAS Software. SPC membership is open to all companies, academic institutions and individuals.