News release

Compaq Announces First Mission-Critical NAS Appliance Built Entirely on Industry Standards

TaskSmart Clustering Maximizes Scalability and Availability in the Enterprise

Enabling customers to meet growing data capacity and complexity requirements, Compaq Computer Corporation (NYSE: CPQ) today announced clustering technology for its TaskSmart N-Series Network Attached Storage (NAS) appliances, delivering the first highly available, standards-based NAS solution for enterprise customers. The new TaskSmart N-Series Cluster will provide customers with mission-critical levels of reliability and uptime while providing scalability beyond 10TB of data storage. The TaskSmart N-Series Cluster is the first NAS cluster to be built entirely on industry standard hardware, operating systems, and application software technology, enabling customers to achieve seamless integration into existing server and storage management environments while protecting against downtime with a no-single-point-of-failure solution.

"Since the introduction of our first NAS appliance, we have driven standards-based NAS appliance technology further into the enterprise to meet the mission-critical file serving needs of our customers," said John Young, Vice President, TaskSmart Servers, Compaq Industry Standard Server Group. "Every minute of downtime means loss of revenue for customers. The TaskSmart N-Series Cluster delivers 24x7 access to critical data and massive storage scalability with the ongoing ownership cost benefits of an industry standard appliance."

In addition to the TaskSmart N-Series Cluster announced today, Compaq also announced enhanced product support for its existing departmental and workgroup TaskSmart N2400 appliance, enabling customers to meet increased storage capacity, performance and data protection challenges. The enhancements include support of up to 2TB of storage for increased scalability and storage consolidation, Gigabit Ethernet support for streamlined data transfers, and anti-virus support for protecting critical data running on TaskSmart appliances.

TaskSmart N-Series Cluster

The TaskSmart N-Series Cluster is an optimized NAS appliance that, with new high availability features, continues to build on Compaq's Enterprise Network Storage Architecture to provide total integration into existing and future IT environments. Providing up to 10TB of storage with clustering technology, the new TaskSmart N-Series Cluster will deliver customers maximum scalability and the highest levels of performance and availability in a no-single-point-of-failure configuration.

"The advanced storage solutions we recommend and deploy for enterprise customers must offer more than performance. Our customers look for mission-critical solutions that enable them to centralize, protect and scale their most critical data storage seamlessly while ensuring no single point of failure," said Larry Holzenthaler, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Total Tec, a systems integrator and Compaq Enterprise Authorized Reseller. "Using industry standard components, the TaskSmart appliance delivers a breakthrough price point, investment protection and flexibility for a mixed NAS, SAN and direct attach environment."

The new TaskSmart N-Series Cluster is based on proven ProLiant™ server and StorageWorks™ technologies powered by Microsoft Windows^® 2000 Advanced Server optimized for NAS. Compared to the competition, the N-Series Cluster's industry-standard architecture lowers ongoing costs because of it ease of integration and simplified management and spares strategies based on universal components.

Availability Services for the TaskSmart N-Series Cluster

Compaq has a full range of availability services designed to help customers design and deploy end-to-end solutions for the TaskSmart N-Series Cluster through the capabilities of Compaq Global Services. As the single point of accountability, Compaq provides full support offerings through assessment and installation services for the NAS cluster. The assessment services determine customer requirements for installation of the 2-Node cluster, including a TaskSmart NAS Assessment Report, and the installation services include configuring and installing the clustering hardware and software into the customer's environment. CarePaq and Operating Incident support options are also available for ongoing support of the TaskSmart N-Series Cluster.

Enhancements for N-Series in Corporate and Workgroup environments

In addition to the TaskSmart N-Series Cluster announcement, Compaq also continues to enhance its TaskSmart N2400 enterprise department NAS appliance. The TaskSmart N2400 now supports enhanced performance through Gigabit Ethernet connectivity and increased scalability to 2TB of storage with support of 36GB 1" universal drives. TaskSmart also increases data availability and protection by providing support for anti-virus software from Network Associates, Symantec and Trend Micro.

Pricing and Availability

Pricing for the new TaskSmart N-Series Cluster starts at $175,000 for a 144GB configuration. The system will be available to customers from Compaq resellers and DirectPlus within the first quarter of 2001. The TaskSmart N2400 enterprise departmental NAS product enhancements are available today.

About Compaq

Compaq Computer Corporation, a Fortune Global 100 company, is the largest supplier of computing systems in the world. Compaq designs, develops, manufactures, and markets hardware, software, solutions, and services, including industry-leading enterprise computing solutions, fault-tolerant business-critical solutions, and communications products, commercial desktop and portable products, and consumer PCs.

Compaq products and services are sold in more than 200 countries directly to businesses, through a network of authorized Compaq marketing partners, and directly to businesses and consumers through Compaq's e-commerce Web site at http://www.compaq.com. Compaq markets its products and services primarily to customers from the business, home, government, and education sectors. Customer support and information about Compaq and its products and services are available at http://www.compaq.com.