VISUALIZATION

LUMBERTON, NJ -- INRANGE Technologies (Nasdaq: INRG), a leader in scalable storage networking solutions, announced today that EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) has qualified the 64-port version of the INRANGE IN-VSN(TM) FC/9000(TM) Fibre Channel Director as E-Lab Tested for use in Enterprise Storage Networks (ESNs) employing EMC's Symmetrix Enterprise Storage systems. According to the latest Gartner Group report on the storage market, EMC's Symmetrix is a market-leading storage platform for use in storage area network applications, with a 38.8% market share. These storage area networks enable users to make available information residing on multiple, heterogeneous systems -- or storage pools -- and share it across the enterprise, while leveraging common management and infrastructure through advanced storage networking technology. INRANGE's FC/9000, which can support in a single footprint up to 128 ports of high-availability switching between servers and storage systems, scales non-disruptively to accommodate the connectivity requirements to these storage pools, which most analysts expect to grow by 75% or more annually. INRANGE was one of the first 13 members of the EMC E-Infostructure Interoperability Program, joining in June 2000. The FC/9000 qualification attained through EMC's E-Infostructure Interoperability Program builds upon a 7-year relationship between EMC and INRANGE in which the companies have teamed to deliver joint solutions for enterprise-scale storage networks. As part of this program, the companies maintain cooperative service agreements (CSAs) for fast, streamlined support of joint customers, and together provide advanced storage networking configurations for applications such as long-distance storage and remote disk mirroring. The EMC E-Lab Tested qualification process is recognized for its thoroughness in interoperability, failure recovery, and other testing. EMC has invested nearly a decade and $2 billion in equipment, people, and resources to qualify and test the industry's widest range of components for sustained interoperability across networked storage environments. "EMC continues to invest more in interoperability testing than all of our major competitors combined. We accept this responsibility to assure our customers of the highest quality and broadest choice of networked storage connectivity options," said Chuck Hollis, EMC's Vice President of Markets and Products. "Working closely with INRANGE, we are pleased to offer our joint customers integrated solutions backed by the EMC E-Lab Tested interoperability `seal of approval'." In 1994, INRANGE became the first vendor to extend EMC's SRDF remote mirroring technology over standard telecommunications lines, via its IN-VSN 9801 Storage Networking System. In addition to the FC/9000, two other key members of INRANGE's IN-VSN family -- the CD/9000(R) Channel Director and Spectrum Wavelength Division Multiplexers -- have also been qualified through the EMC E-Lab Tested program and are in use with EMC-attached storage components in hundreds of installations worldwide. "Leveraging storage infrastructure is key to sustaining manageable growth in today's information networks," noted John McArthur, Vice President, Worldwide Storage Research at IDC. "Large deployments such as those based on Symmetrix can benefit from the scale and high-availability of an INRANGE director at their core to help reduce management complexity, improve uptime, and support server consolidation -- all of which combine to lower the total cost of storage ownership." "The FC/9000 qualification initiative with Symmetrix is an important next step in our long history with EMC," stated INRANGE CEO Greg Grodhaus. "It expands our fibre channel offerings to the broad EMC customer base and builds on our commitment to deliver storage networking solutions that are flexible and open, supporting the widest array of servers and storage in the industry. Given that EMC has the industry's largest storage market share, it is key that we work well together."