Features - Storage Innovations:

InMage INTRODUCES DATA CONTINUITY

InMage Systems announced its entrance into the storage industry with a new category -- Data Continuity -- that supports companies that depend on the integrity of their backup, recovery and replication operations for business continuity. With patent pending technology, InMage is the first company to provide cost-effective data continuity solutions by delivering consistent, fine-grained business event recovery at any location, any time, within any storage environment. With InMage's proactive methodology, customers can instantly recover to any business event such as a large financial transaction, or any other significant occurrence in day-to-day enterprise operations.

InMage's data continuity product initially addresses the combined host-based replication and backup markets, which Gartner Group (a Connecticut-based research firm) estimates at $2.8 billion. With a seasoned executive team, led by industry veteran Kumar Malavalli -- an inductee of the Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame and co-founder and former CTO of Brocade -- InMage is positioned to deliver the first form of data protection that is both affordable and aligned with business objectives across geographical boundaries. To support the company and its vision, InMage has secured $7.3 million in Series A Funding from Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, Malavalli and strategic Angel investors.

"The companies in our investment portfolio are characterized by a unique technology vision, an exceptional management team that can execute to plan, and a solid market opportunity with strong customer support. InMage fits this profile," said Doug Hickey, partner at Hummer Winblad. "Kumar Malavalli and his team have already established themselves in a leadership position with a new market category called data continuity. We believe data continuity -- and in particular, the InMage solution -- will transform the way companies think about information backup, restoration, replication and archiving."

Business disruption due to lack of continuous data availability is extraordinarily costly for businesses around the world. The National Archives and Records Administration reports that more than 93 percent of companies that lost their data center for 10 days or more due to a disaster filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster. Even the largest enterprises are exposed to the prospect of frequent business interruptions due to infrequent backups, backup failures, data corruptions, virus attacks and other disasters. Current solutions fall short on both technology and cost fronts by scheduling backups and recovery on a single dimension -- time -- with no correlation to an organization's business events. This approach limits an organization's ability to accurately assure data consistency across geographical boundaries or to recover information based on a significant transaction or meaningful activity.

"We are building a world-class company focused entirely on eliminating the business disruption caused by failures in the data center," explained Malavalli. "With data continuity, companies can protect and recover information tied to any business event, at any time, anywhere, on any storage environment. I'm delighted with the wide industry support we are receiving with our new approach to the backup and replication markets and look forward to defining the next generation of solutions that support business continuity."

Malavalli has assembled an all-star executive team whose members have contributed to the success of premiere companies such as Amdahl, Brocade, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Motorola, Microsoft and Gadzoox as well as prepared emerging technology companies for liquidity events. Based on this strong management team and innovative, patent-pending technology, InMage is well positioned to deliver a solution that breaks the mold established by existing data protection and disaster recovery solutions.

InMage Delivers Data Continuity Solution To Eliminate Business Disruption

InMage's data continuity solution enables organizations to reduce their data center storage total cost of ownership by 50 percent while eliminating the hours, days or possibly weeks of rework required after a data center failure or disaster. InMage's patent-pending software combines:

• Continuous data backup and recovery with sophisticated information tiering, which significantly reduces the host footprint and data movement, and provides a unified interface for protection, recovery and management. This breakthrough approach offers data continuity that is affordable, consistent, applicationfocused and aligned with business objectives.
• Local and remote application-level consistent copies based on real-time data gathering and movement. The data continuity architecture provides always on, granular and rapid recovery that eliminates business disruption.
• Business event-based data protection. With its awareness of business events and multi-tiered applications synchronized across distributed data centers, InMage's data continuity product offers vast improvements over existing data backup and recovery solutions.

InMage has already secured revenue customers and installed its data continuity solution in large enterprise data centers around the world. The company expects to announce the general availability of its data continuity solution in the first half of 2005; product, pricing support and customer details will be announced at that time.