Features - Financial Plays Of The Week:

IBM TO MARKET CNT'S UltraNet MULTI-SERVICE DIRECTOR

CNT announced an OEM agreement with IBM for the sale and worldwide distribution of its UltraNet Multi-service Director (UMD) product. As part of this agreement, IBM will resell the UMD products under the TotalStorage brand, providing customers with a scalable and flexible storage networking infrastructure platform for their current and future storage networking requirements.

"Through this OEM agreement, we will continue to offer customers the ability to integrate IBM server, software and storage technologies with CNT's Fibre Channel and FICON director technology. This will provide both mainframe and open systems customers with more affordable, easier-to-use and easier-to-manage IBM TotalStorage business continuity and information life-cycle management (ILM) solutions," said Robert Mahoney, business line executive for storage networking at IBM.

"The IBM and CNT relationship is an important step that will benefit customers," said Tony Asaro, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "IBM will now sell and support the CNT UltraNet Multi-service Director (UMD), an intelligent and scalable SAN Director, as part of the TotalStorage product family. This partnership makes it easier for customers to acquire the UMD and get support and service from IBM on a global basis."

"We are pleased that IBM has chosen to OEM our newest and most powerful storage networking platform, extending the reach of our UltraNet Multi-service Director across new sales channels and geographies," said Tom Hudson, president and CEO at CNT. "But ultimately, it is the end users that will benefit from this highly flexible and scalable solution that accelerates new storage initiatives such as SAN consolidation, tiered storage, ILM, and on demand computing. The UMD provides unprecedented investment protection for today's demanding SAN environments, allowing customers to scale port count, extend over distance and incorporate storage services -- all in the same platform. It's an ideal complement to some of the new and emerging technologies in IBM's TotalStorage portfolio."

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 consolidation, tiered storage, ILM and utility computing. The UMD features the UltraScale(TM) 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 a provider of 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.