SCIENCE

HOUSTON, TX -- Compaq Computer Corporation (NYSE: CPQ) has been selected by FreeMarkets Inc. to power its B2B Global Marketplace. FreeMarkets has created over 11,500 online markets for more than $16.6 billion worth of goods and services and created estimated savings of over $3.2 billion for its customers. "Compaq's SAN solution ensures the reliability needed in today's competitive marketplace," said John Benzinger, FreeMarkets' vice president of information technology. "In addition, the Compaq SAN offers the scalability to match our growth rate and it works with existing file servers and operating systems. Overall, the Compaq partnership enables us to build a product that is able to scale with our business and deliver what we need to ensure 100 percent reliability and availability that are the hallmarks of our commitment to our customers." Compaq supplies a complete solution integrating servers, storage, software and services. Compaq connected FreeMarkets' heterogeneous technology environment and added an additional 3.01 terabytes of storage. This extended the company's total capacity, allocated over multiple systems creating a pool of more than 11 terabytes. FreeMarkets' storage area network is connected to multiple servers and operating systems including Compaq ProLiant servers running the Microsoft Windows 2000 Datacenter server operating system. Compaq is reportedly the world's number one SAN supplier, according to recent Dataquest research conducted on year 2000 sales. With more than 24,000 SAN- attached RAID arrays shipped last year, Compaq sold more SANs than its six nearest competitors combined, accounting for a 48.5 percent market share. Compaq Enterprise Storage Group is committed to simplifying the Open SAN through its Enterprise Network Storage Architecture (ENSA), which enables customers to efficiently manage complex, mixed storage environments. For additional information visit http://www.compaq.com/products/storageworks/SAN/index.html