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CNT REMAINS FICON LEADER WITH UltraNet MULTI-SERVICE DIRECTOR

CNT announced that the CNT UltraNet Multi-Service Director (UMD) has already seen significant success in the FICON director market in its first two months of availability. Designed to enable key customer IT strategies such as infrastructure simplification, tiered storage, and information lifecycle management (ILM), the UMD provides the scalability and reliability demanded by enterprise customers. This fourth-generation director builds on CNT's strength in FICON/zSeries environments and, with up to 256 non-blocking ports, is the only director on the market that can match the scale offered by new FICONbased server and storage systems.

CNT's partners and resellers have recognized that the UMD is an important offering across all director markets, including midrange and smaller enterprise accounts, and open systems environments, as well as large FICON zSeries installations where CNT's previous generation SAN director, the FC/9000, also demonstrated market leadership. Because of this broad, acrossthe -board customer interest, the UMD has already found a home in many existing and new accounts, in a variety of industries around the world.

One of the largest financial institutions in Europe selected CNT's UltraNet Multi-service Director to meet the needs of its rapidly growing FICON environment. They ordered two fully-populated 256 port UMD-Model 16's to augment their existing FC/9000 FICON environment. The customer chose the UMD to meet important business requirements, including scalability, interoperability, and long-term investment protection. The UMD's new logical domains capability provided added security and SAN isolation. In addition, they required CNT's unmatched FICON management features, including FICON CUP and FICON Cascading.

An international airline, in the process of migrating its entire ESCON-based mainframe environment over to FICON, selected CNT's UMD because of its rich FICON support, its industry leading port- and performance-scalability and its seamless support for future connectivity requirements. The customer also chose to put CNT's UMD at the core of their open systems SAN infrastructure, consolidating the two previously-separate environments to simplify management and reduce costs.

One of the largest non-military agencies in the U.S. Federal government selected CNT's UMD to expand the capacity of its ever-growing FICON environment. Their mission critical applications have to be up 24x7 -- period. The UMD's reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) features, including active-active loadsharing and failover, hot swappable components, non-disruptive code load and activation, advanced diagnostics and proactive reporting, met the agency's high reliability requirements while providing a seamless growth path for the future. Down the road, the customer plans to interconnect multiple sites and will leverage the UMD's extension capabilities to enhance their disaster protection.

These customer examples highlight the UMD's ability to support a variety of business and IT requirements, including seamless and manageable SAN growth, infrastructure simplification and Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery, while delivering flexibility and investment protection.

"CNT has a long history with FICON and mainframe/zSeries environments. In addition to our market leading FICON director platforms, CNT provides the only FICON emulation technology on the market for extending FICON storage systems and applications over long distances for disaster resilience. CNT also offers a variety of professional services to help customers assess, justify and implement the migration to FICON. The initial market response to UMD confirms that when it comes to FICON storage networking, no one can match CNT's technology offerings and technical expertise," said Mark Knittel, worldwide vice president of Product Operations at CNT.

About UltraNet Multi-service Director

The UltraNet Multi-service Director is the only true multi-service director on the market. This new generation storage networking platform delivers unprecedented scalability, flexibility, and investment protection to meet dynamic and evolving business requirements for IT strategies like SAN and storage consolidation, tiered storage, and Data Lifecycle Management. The UMD features the UltraScale architecture, which offers scalability up to and beyond 512 non-blocking ports at 4 Gbps speed and the flexibility to upgrade as speeds and protocols evolve. The UMD delivers unmatched and uncompromised performance at full capacity and is the industry's only platform for meaningful deployment of WAN/MAN extension and storage services such as virtualization and data replication.

About CNT

CNT is the expert in today's most cost-effective and reliable storage networking solutions. For over 20 years, businesses around the world have depended on us to improve business efficiency, increase data availability and manage their business-critical information. CNT applies its technology, products and expertise in open storage networking architecture and business continuity to help companies build end-to-end solutions consisting of analysis, planning and design, multi-vendor integration, implementation and ongoing remote management of the SAN or storage infrastructure. For more information, visit CNT's Web site at www.cnt.com/ or call (763) 268-6000.