San Jose, Calif. - January 24, 2006 -- At the Storage Networking Industry Association's (SNIA) annual Winter Symposium, the Internet Protocol (IP) Storage Forum introduced its newly elected governing board, reviewed progress during 2005, and outlined their plans to continue to drive the widespread adoption of IP-based Storage Area Network (SAN) solutions through global marketing initiatives and end-user education through 2006.

The new IP Storage Forum board consists of: chair, David Dale of Network Appliance; vice chair, Prasad Pammidimukkala of McDATA; marketing director, Rob Higby of EqualLogic; treasurer, Doug Rainbolt of Intransa; and business development director, Don Mead of FalconStor Software. The IP Storage Forum's agenda for 2006 to builds on their successes of the past two years. End-user education around the world (through seminars, webinars, SNIA tutorials, industry events, and hands-on demonstrations) remains a primary focus. In addition, the Forum will continue to create collateral, articles, deployment case studies, and technology positioning materials to provide vendor-neutral industry education which complements member companies' individual marketing initiatives and materials.

"2005 saw enormous growth in the market for IP-based SAN storage technology, as leading server and storage vendors released products, and IT organizations around the world installed IP Storage solutions to consolidate, simplify, bullet proof, and reduce data management costs in their business critical applications environment," said David Dale, SNIA IP Storage Forum chair. "We anticipate this growth to further accelerate in 2006, as Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI)-based SANs continue to rapidly replace direct-attached storage in the Windows market, and as a broad range of affordable IP SAN solutions become available from more vendors for more environments."

IP Storage made significant advances on several fronts during 2005. In the standards arena, the Internet Fibre Channel Protocol (iFCP) was ratified by the Internet Engineering Task Force (RFC 4172), joining Fibre Channel over TCP/IP (FCIP) (ratified in 2004 - RFC 3821) and iSCSI (ratified in 2003 - RFC 3720). In addition, the most recent version of the Storage Management Initiative Specification, SMI-S version 1.1 includes support for iSCSI.

IP Storage also made considerable progress in terms of customer deployments over the past year. Most analysts now view iSCSI as a mainstream SAN solution for business-critical Windows server environments in medium and large organizations, with estimates that more than 6000 customers worldwide have deployed iSCSI-based SAN solutions. Looking forward, the IP Storage Forum expects the continued expansion of the Windows market, and the emergence of complete native iSCSI solutions for UNIX and Linux to further accelerate growth. IDC views iSCSI as the fastest-growing area of the storage market - with an expected 211% compound annual growth for 2005-2009, and the market reaching $2.65B in 2009.

"IP storage has seen dramatic growth in Europe thanks to the strong move towards cost-effective storage consolidation, increased data protection adoption rates, and the widespread adoption of sound disaster recovery strategies," said Aad Dekkers, Chair, SNIA-Europe IP Storage Initiative. 'We are working closely with the IP Storage Forum to provide a unified source of education for vendors, channel partners and end users throughout Europe and the US. IP Storage can be an asset for many organizations and it is our aim to enable these businesses to realize their potential."

About the SNIA
The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is a not-for-profit global organization made up of more than 420 active member companies plus their worldwide affiliates and close to 7,100 active individuals spanning virtually the entire storage industry. SNIA members share the common goal of advancing the adoption of storage networks as complete and trusted solutions. To this end, the SNIA is uniquely committed to delivering standards, education and services that will propel open storage networking solutions into the broader market. For additional information, visit the SNIA web site at http://www.snia.org.

About the SNIA IP Storage Forum
The IP Storage Forum is a SNIA Forum focused on driving the broad adoption of IP-based SAN storage solutions. For more information, visit www.ipstorage.org. The IP Storage Forum works closely with the SNIA-Europe IP Storage Initiative committee, and the SNIA International committee, to deliver its message around the world.

About the SNIA IP Storage Initiative (IPSI) in Europe
The SNIA-Europe IP Storage Initiative is the sister organization of the IP Storage Forum and focused on driving the broad adoption of IP-based SAN storage solutions in Europe through evangelism, education and promotion. For more information, visit http://www.snia-europe.org/.