News release

Channel Partners and Compaq Deliver Enterprise Storage Solutions

Partners Demonstrate Compaq's Storage Leadership Across Multiple Industries

As the enterprise storage market leader, Compaq Computer Corporation (NYSE: CPQ) reports that enterprise storage revenue gained through collaboration with United States channel partners during the past six months totals more than $300 million, clearly demonstrating that Compaq's strategy of providing innovative, comprehensive storage solutions to customers via its channel partners is gaining momentum.

"Companies are looking for ways to consolidate their data storage in systems designed to facilitate easy access, improve data management, and provide business continuity with better security and extensive scalability," said Mark Gonzalez, vice president Compaq North America, Enterprise Storage Group. "Today, Compaq's Business Partners are providing customers with the knowledge, expertise, and StorageWorks by Compaq technology to offer a wide range of centralized solutions that can be tailored to specific requirements."

Storage Solutions for Manufacturing and Service

Mission Linen Supply specializes in the sale and rental of textiles to hotels, restaurants, and other establishments. Mission Linen worked with CompuVision, a Santa Barbara-based systems integrator with 15 years of experience. CompuVision recommended industry-standard Compaq ProLiant servers and StorageWorks solutions to build a modular, thin-client information architecture supporting IP.

The new network uses VPN technology to streamline communication among Mission Linen facilities. To store and manage business data, Mission Linen implemented two storage-area networks (SANs). Each SAN includes StorageWorks RAID Array 4100 systems with three disk enclosures. One SAN, dedicated to file and print sharing, contains 432 GB of capacity. The other SAN supports the SAP R/3 infrastructure and affords 865 GB of capacity.

"By consolidating storage in a single enclosure, Mission Linen can more efficiently configure, manage, and maintain its storage resources," said John J. Hunt, president and CEO of CompuVision. "The thin-client infrastructure allows all the servers and software applications to be housed in Mission Linen's data center."

CompuVision installed and configured the SANs and spearheaded the creation of LANs and WANs to connect 50 offices in five states—all of which have 24x7 access to the Compaq servers and storage devices.

"Thanks to Compaq and CompuVision, we're first to market with self-service business applications and a robust VPN. CompuVision designed a simple, useful end-to-end network. This will help us complete more effectively in the years ahead," said Dick Bergstrom, director of IT, Mission Linen Supply.

As competition heats up in the service industry, many mid-sized firms are deploying enterprise-scale information systems to gain an edge over their competitors. Supported by industry-standard ProLiant servers and StorageWorks solutions, Mission Linen now has a versatile information architecture that supports advanced communications among dozens of remote facilities, paving the way for future growth.

Tyson Foods, Inc. (NYSE: TSN)—the world's largest poultry and meat processing company—chose Compaq AlphaServer and StorageWorks to host its mission-critical sales and distribution applications. (See related news release: "Tyson Foods Chooses Compaq High Availability Solution for Mission-Critical Applications.") Tyson expects this IT architecture investment to help it integrate its various business units while speeding up some of its business processes and positioning itself for future growth.

"We needed an IT architecture that would enable us to quickly and seamlessly port our mission-critical sales and distribution applications while providing the highest availability and data integrity," said Gary Cooper, CIO, Tyson Foods, Inc. "Our desired solution also needed to easily scale as we integrated additional business units. Compaq met our mission-critical needs while providing a painless migration path from our legacy systems."

IT infrastructure architect Avnet Enterprise Solutions—a Compaq business partner—was responsible for system configuration and initial system setup. The production platform includes a three-node AlphaServer ES40 cluster (with four processors on each node) running OpenVMS. The AlphaServer cluster is attached to an MA8000 StorageWorks scalable SAN, which allows additional disks, controllers, and cache to be added incrementally when required.

"Compaq has a rich history in providing high availability systems," said Mark Zerbe, president, Avnet Enterprise Solutions. "Avnet Enterprise Solutions' long-standing partnership with Compaq and our focus on Compaq hardware and software solutions means we can offer customers the kind of expertise and value they're looking for."

Comark, of Bloomingdale, IL—one of the largest privately held IT solutions providers in the U.S.—designed and configured a 2.8 TB SAN for a medium-sized manufacturing company that recently acquired another company and needed to consolidate systems to accommodate the rapid growth for the customer's Oracle production database. The IT effort also included 50 industry-standard Compaq ProLiant servers running Windows 2000, Windows NT, and Novell software. The new Compaq SAN allows for upgrades on the fly and offers a more scalable solution to accommodate future growth.

Vito Valenzano, director of high performance systems and storage for Comark, said: "This is a great example of how a channel partner can bring value to both the customer and the vendor. Comark provides value to its customers through its relationship with vendors as well as intellectual capital required to design solutions that meet the customer's needs."

Banking on Partners

ARVEST Bank Operations Inc. of Lowell, AR—the largest banking group headquartered in Arkansas with $4 billion in assets—has chosen an end-to-end storage solution from Compaq to help ensure that its electronic banking systems are always available. (See related news release: "ARVEST Chooses Compaq for StorageWorks to Provide High Availability Electronic Banking Solution.") ARVEST has already chosen Compaq as its technology standard for servers, desktops, and laptops.

Its innovative Internet banking site is the most outwardly apparent part of ARVEST's electronic banking system. However, the bank relies on a whole host of other electronic systems for its day-to-day transactions, including its check imaging system, AFS Image Vision. These systems are absolutely critical to the bank's daily operations, and even occasional system downtime can be very costly. ARVEST needed a high availability storage solution at a price/performance level that wouldn't break the bank.

Integrated Solutions Group—a Compaq Authorized Enterprise Reseller with locations in Oklahoma, Missouri and Kansas—designed and configured the ARVEST solution. The solution included a 1.5 TB fibre-attached SAN, complete with SANworks Management Appliance and Compaq SecurePath software. At the heart of the SAN is the Enterprise Modular Array (EMA) 16000, which is the newest and the highest capacity storage solution in the Compaq StorageWorks Modular Array Family. Since this array can provide up to 168 disks with a capacity of up to 12.2 TB, ARVEST is assured of plenty of growing room.

Ranked by US Banker magazine as the nation's 26th largest national mortgage banking firm, Resource Bancshares Mortgage Group, Inc.—a wholly-owned subsidiary of NetBank, Inc. (NTBK)—was facing an increasingly complex IT infrastructure, including several IT sites and a server farm of more than 170 systems. In order to gain greater control over storage utilization, improve backup and disaster recovery planning, reduce management overhead, and enable IT to respond faster to organizational and competitive challenges, RBMG turned to Compaq and Carotek of Matthews, NC, to provide a Compaq StorageWorks SAN to achieve IT velocity.

"Our focus on hardware and software solutions from Compaq means that we offer customers the technical expertise and proficiency to implement the solution they need," said Bob Warf, vice president and division manager, Carotek's Information Technology Division. As part of its StorageWorks SAN implementation, Carotek designed and installed the initial SAN at RBMG in late 1997. Today, the SAN has grown, with Carotek's help, to over 6 TB of capacity, SAN management via the SAN appliance, and a full Enterprise Backup implementation. Work is already underway to implement additional SAN capacity to expand business continuity efforts in support of the recent acquisition by NetBank.

"The improvements in moving to the Compaq StorageWorks SAN were so obvious that we never looked back," said Chip Register, senior vice president and CIO, Resource Bancshares Mortgage Group. "It was evident from the beginning that we had made the right choice to support our mission-critical applications, manage performance, and improve disaster recovery effectiveness."

Partnering in Healthcare

Baptist Memorial Health Care Corp. in Memphis, TN, recently launched a $5 million effort to consolidate hospital and medical group information systems for greater efficiency and easier expansion. A new Compaq SAN-based enterprise storage network will allow Baptist to build out its IT infrastructure in phases to meet the rapid growth of data created by new imaging technologies, such as radiology systems and scanned medical systems.

Pomeroy—a national system integrator headquartered in Hebron, KY—worked closely with Compaq and Baptist Memorial in the development and installation of the new infrastructure. "Our customers have faith in Compaq's ability to develop innovative solutions and Pomeroy's ability to integrate the solutions both today and in the future. We're committed to working with Compaq to help customers like Baptist Memorial meet their IT challenges," said Tim Tonges, executive vice president, Pomeroy Computer Resources.

The IT effort at Baptist includes 3 TB of storage and over 64 servers, integrating a solution that includes industry-standard ProLiant servers with Windows 2000, ProLiant servers with Netware, OpenVMS-based AlphaServer GS systems, and StorageWorks Fibre Channel SAN and SAN-based tape libraries.

Solution Providers Use and Recommend Compaq Storage Solutions

Manchester Technologies, Inc., an IT solutions provider based in Hauppauge, NY, both uses and recommends advanced Compaq storage technology. According to Craig Christiansen, Manchester systems design engineer: "Since September 11, there's been strong emphasis on disaster recovery for all our customers, so we recommend the data-replication services Compaq provides. With SANworks Data Replication Manager (DRM) by Compaq, you can replicate your data at a remote site and create a snapshot, then back it up to a tape drive —all while leaving your critical production site running."

Manchester Technologies specializes in hardware and software procurement, custom networking, storage, enterprise, and Internet solutions. "We recommend SANworks DRM for very good reasons. It's controller based, not host-based, so it frees up our production servers. Also, we can implement it and modify it as we choose—without needing somebody else to reconfigure our system—which gives us considerable flexibility," said Christiansen.

About Compaq Enterprise Storage

Compaq, the number one global storage solutions supplier, is the leader in the development and delivery of the enterprise SAN. Recognized for its vision and ability to execute, Compaq is committed to driving radical simplification and investment protection for enterprise and SMB customers. By continuing to extend its Enterprise Network Storage Architecture (ENSA) in key areas such as virtualization, automation, universal network storage and life cycle data management, Compaq enables customers to efficiently manage complex, mixed storage environments. More information on StorageWorks and SANworks solutions is available at www.compaq.com/storage.

Company Background

Founded in 1982, Compaq Computer Corporation is a leading global provider of information technology products, services and solutions for enterprise customers. Compaq designs, develops, manufactures and markets information technology equipment, software, services and solutions, including industry-leading enterprise storage and computing solutions, fault-tolerant business-critical solutions, communication products, personal desktop and notebook computers, and personal entertainment and Internet access devices that are sold in more than 200 countries directly and through a network of authorized Compaq marketing partners. Information on Compaq and its products and services is available at http://www.compaq.com.