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BREECE HILL ANNOUNCES THE ACQUISITION OF AVAIL SOLUTIONS

Breece Hill announced the acquisition of Avail Solutions, a data migration and management software company located in Escondido, Calif.

"This acquisition is in line with our long-term business strategy and a direct result of Breece Hill listening to the needs of end users, VARs and OEMs," said Phil Pascarelli, president of Breece Hill. "While there were many choices, we selected Avail software as the foundation of our iStoRA solutions and are convinced it is the most powerful and innovative on the market today. With the integration of Avail, we can now deliver focused solutions that answer the demands for backup, recovery, data protection, disaster recovery and data management services from a single vendor. We are doing today what other industry leaders are only just talking about."

Avail's flagship product, INTEGRITY, has unique file level backup, migration, replication and archive capabilities until now found only in enterprise class environments and mainframe data centers. The INTEGRITY software, with total data management for Windows, Macintosh, SUN and Linux, delivers on the business value proposition of data lifecycle management today. Its unique ability to scale in both capacity and performance enables it to deliver immediate value to its users.

"The IT community has been bombarded with an assortment of ambiguous acronyms referring to the management of data, which generates confusion among both the channel and end user. This is the result of vendors trying to create a perception of differentiation when none exists. Breece Hill's acquisition of Avail Solutions gives them a strong competitive advantage in the D2D2T and ILM space," said Jon Toigo, CEO of Toigo Partners International and chairman of The Storage Management Institute. "Today INTEGRITY unites the iStoRA's disk and tape components with a policy driven, file-level storage management engine and a strong data protection front end. With this acquisition, Breece Hill sets the bar very high for competitors in this space."

"Joining Breece Hill was an easy decision for us to make," said Mark Armstrong, president of Avail Solutions. "They have a rich history in the storage industry and we share a common vision for the future of our business and the industry. Together, we are creating a single organization that has far more capabilities and broader product lines than either firm would have on their own."

"We are delighted to have the Avail team bring their software expertise to the Breece Hill family and for the potential opportunities it brings," said Phil Pascarelli, president of Breece Hill. "Our combined organizations will be able to respond to the data management needs of the market more quickly and to serve our customers better in the storage market which is the most competitive sector of the computer industry."