News release

Compaq Announces Flexible, Industry-Standard Infrastructure Solutions from the Data Center to the Edge

Compaq (NYSE: CPQ) today extended its leadership in delivering intelligent, global server solutions for customers' infrastructure needs from the data center to the edge, by introducing the next generation of market-leading ProLiant™ DL380 and ML370 servers, incorporating for the first time Compaq's Advanced Memory Protection Architecture. Compaq also unveiled new TaskSmart™ appliance servers: the next generation C-series for accelerated content delivery and the new W-series for Web hosting.

Recent announcements regarding 64-bit technology demonstrate Compaq's leadership in taking industry standards deeper into the enterprise. Today's announcement reaffirms Compaq's commitment to continue delivering the broadest family of market-leading, industry-standard servers based on 32-bit architectures in the enterprise.

"In an evolving Internet-driven business climate, customers need flexibility to quickly deploy and redeploy their IT infrastructure and resources," said Mary McDowell, senior vice president and general manager, Compaq Industry Standard Server Group. "The advanced technology and solutions Compaq has developed and integrated into our newest market-leading ProLiant and TaskSmart appliance servers extends Compaq's leadership in industry-standard computing and offers customers a competitive advantage through a simplified and easily managed IT infrastructure."

Committed to Meeting Customers' Needs

Around the world, customers require the ability to adapt to a rapidly changing business environment. Compaq works with these customers, enabling them to spend less time and resources implementing and managing their IT infrastructure.

"The Compaq ProLiant servers and TaskSmart appliances that we have deployed as part of our global Internet infrastructure enable Digital Island to help our customers develop new revenue opportunities via implementing streaming media, storage solutions and other edge service offerings," said Jack Irving, vice president of channel sales and partners, Digital Island. "The service offerings enabled by implementing Compaq technology allow Digital Island customers to drive profitable e-business transactions that are fast, global and secure. We look forward to extending our technology relationship with Compaq to continue implementing excellent server and appliance solutions that provide our customers a consistently excellent Web experience."

ProLiant Servers Deliver New Levels of Value in the Data Center

Extending its leadership in advancing industry-standard technology, Compaq is the first vendor to offer breakthrough levels of memory availability and performance in its ProLiant servers with Online Redundant Spare Memory. The demanding requirements of Internet and enterprise applications are driving larger memory footprints in servers across the data center. Compaq Advanced Memory Protection Architecture utilizes industry-standard memory to offer higher levels of server uptime as well as performance for mission-critical applications. With the introduction of Online Spare Memory, customers can extend memory resilience by offering DIMM level memory fail-over without costly unscheduled downtime. Compaq will continue to extend this new architecture by delivering Hot Plug Memory and RAID Memory in the next-generation ProLiant servers.

The first implementation of Compaq's Advanced Memory Protection Architecture, Online Redundant Spare Memory, will be delivered in the next-generation ProLiant DL380 and ML370 servers. Online Redundant Spare Memory will provide enterprises and service provider (SP) customers higher availability and greater service levels for their users. Setting a new standard in 2-way density optimized computing, the new ProLiant DL380 is the only 2U server to offer the redundant Hot Plug features and enterprise manageability for mission-critical applications. The world's best selling server, the ProLiant ML370 is the first 2-way server with the advanced memory protection and high availability features optimized for remote site and data center environments.

New TaskSmart Appliance Servers Simplify Customers' IT

Compaq's new content acceleration and Web hosting appliance servers continue to reduce complexity in today's IT infrastructure by providing integrated solutions that deliver high performance, yet are simple to deploy and require little or no expertise to manage. Based on industry-standard components, these appliance servers provide the intelligence at the edge of the network required to overcome the bandwidth and infrastructure challenges associated with managing rich content in the pervasive information era.

TaskSmart C-Series Appliances Maximize Bandwidth and Stream Rich Content

The new Compaq TaskSmart C-Series content caching and acceleration appliances enable enterprise and SP customers to maximize their bandwidth resources and deliver complex information effectively to the user. Distance learning, corporate information video-casts, human resource training, graphic design and medical imaging can now be effectively delivered and managed with the TaskSmart C4000 by pushing the rich content through the network and closer to the access device. The result of the Compaq and Inktomi alliance announced in March, the performance-optimized Compaq TaskSmart C4000 appliance is built on Inktomi^® Traffic Server^® network cache and Traffic Server^® and Media-IXT™ software.

New TaskSmart W-Series Appliance Servers - Instant, Scalable Web Hosting

The Compaq TaskSmart W2200 Web hosting appliance server is designed for high-performance dedicated or shared Web hosting. With complete browser-based setup and administration, the W-Series is pre-configured for optimal performance out of the box, minimizing the amount of setup, tuning time and resources required—enabling customers to deploy a functional Web server in as little as five minutes. The TaskSmart W2200 is designed for enterprise customers and Web hosting SPs that need to rapidly deploy large numbers of fixed-configuration Web servers.

Product Pricing and Availability

The ProLiant DL380 and ML370 will be available with pricing in July 2001. For more details on the new ProLiant DL380 and ML370, please visit http://www.compaq.com/ProLiant. The TaskSmart C4000 starts at $7199 and will be available in July 2001. The TaskSmart W2200 is available immediately with pricing from $1799. For more information on the TaskSmart family of appliance servers please visit http://www.compaq.com/TaskSmart. As part of a total solution offering, Compaq Global Services further enables customers to quickly deploy these solutions through a comprehensive set of lifecycle services, which include planning, design, implementation, management, and support of ProLiant and TaskSmart solutions. For more information please visit http://www.compaq.com/services/.

About Compaq

Compaq Computer Corporation, a Fortune Global 100 company, is a leading global provider of technology and solutions. 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 that are sold in more than 200 countries. Information on Compaq and its products and services is available at http://www.compaq.com.