Intelligent, Scalable System Provides Centralized Policy-based Management Services for the Coordination and Consolidation of Complex Storage Networks

SOUTHBOROUGH, MASS., October 28, 2003 - In response to data center users' increasing demands for policy-based tools that minimize the complexity and cost of managing storage networks, Cloverleaf Communications today announced its Intelligent Storage Networking System( (iSN() for delivering unmatched policy-based management services across heterogeneous products, vendors and technologies.  iSN is a flexible and powerful three-dimensional (3-D) system that consolidates not only storage capacity, but also bandwidth and services.  For Cloverleaf, virtualization is an enabling technology to provide storage application level services as compared to a single function appliance.  iSN provides an intelligent, fault-tolerant, non disruptive, highly scalable system area networking solution, assuring business continuity through its unique disaster recovery, data protection and high availability services.

Cloverleaf's iSN treats the data center as a single integrated entity - the first-of-its-kind system consolidates both SAN and NAS to a single system/storage area network to provide application servers with both block and file services.  Essentially, the Cloverleaf system not only enables the pooling of legacy, standards-based storage but its technology agnostic architecture enables users to embrace best-of-breed technologies and future technology products as they evolve.  iSN also provides advanced performance and bandwidth management capabilities through its unique ability to consolidate bandwidth in addition to storage.  Offering SLA-based policy automation at the enterprise level as well as a comprehensive suite of applications for business continuance, iSN goes beyond the elementary function of capacity consolidation, providing a rich portfolio of scalable network services for enhanced data center utilization, management, scalability and performance.

"Today's storage capacity virtualization appliances solve the problem of pooling heterogeneous storage, but they fall short in addressing users' overall pain in managing the cost and complexity of their networks," said Avi Weiss, CEO of Cloverleaf.  "It's like a house - the basic structure is important, it keeps out the elements but it's not a place you would want to live in until you add essential resources, such as water, electricity, phone and even furnishings.  Cloverleaf's intelligent storage networking system not only provides a strong, proven infrastructure for simplifying data center complexity but its services deliver, for the first time, QoS and SLA capabilities, enabling more efficient management of ALL network resources.  This, in effect, allows companies to turn their IT data centers, which to date have been high cost centers, into business contribution and profit centers."

Arun Taneja, founder of Taneja Group, a technology analyst firm, commented, "We believe that Cloverleaf represents some of the most serious 'adult thinking' that we've seen with regards to mission-critical storage management.  This is a piece of technology that should exceed many customers' expectations in its breadth of function, in particular its flexibility, reliability and scalability.  For these reasons we see this as a perfect solution for systems integrators (SIs) as it truly enables the kind of economic and operational efficiencies that drive the heart of the SI business model."

Cloverleaf's Intelligent Storage Networking System

Delivered as a rack-based system, Cloverleaf provides a very robust, highly scalable computer architecture which is built of a tight integration of off-the-shelf, commodity hardware components. There is no proprietary hardware for users or SIs to qualify.  iSN scales up to 12 server blade controllers, where the powerful Cloverleaf software resides, interconnected via Fibre Channel fabrics which together with Gb Ethernet adapters and switches also serves  to connect to the SAN and NAS existing infrastructure.  The system incorporates a patch panel with the ability to automatically discover and integrate all network components for instant plug-in integration of hosts, storage resources or SAN/NAS islands.  Additionally, Cloverleaf's system provides a common management console that can manage resources both locally and remotely with both GUI and CLI support.

iSN not only consolidates heterogeneous storage devices into one easy-to-manage capacity pool, but also allows use of tiered storage for tiered applications, providing easy allocation of the most appropriate class of storage based on the value of the data and applications.  This tiering can support standards-based legacy products ranging from large monolithic arrays to small JBODs across vendor, technology and product types.

According to Brad Friedman, vice president of information services for Burlington Coat Factory Warehouse Corporation, a Cloverleaf beta customer, "The amount of storage that needs to be managed by the enterprise is increasing exponentially.  The Cloverleaf system will simplify our management significantly - we will manage a consolidated pool of storage rather than potentially discreet islands of storage as well as utilize and scale best-of-breed and often inexpensive storage without disruption.  And the ability to manage the enterprise from a single storage strategy will make life a lot easier for us, allow us to not only stretch our storage dollars but also to deploy storage quickly, wherever and whenever within our data center enterprise."

Cloverleaf's Unique Services

Cloverleaf's core value resides in the system's software, which delivers unique enterprise level services across diverse products and technologies.  The Cloverleaf system provides fast and efficient recovery through it snapshots.  iSN is capable of supporting up to 32,000 instantaneous snapshots in an entry level configuration for extremely fast restores.  As these pointer-based snapshots are created without disruption and do not consume excessive capacity as a complete copy does, traditional backup windows are essentially eliminated.  This significantly improves capacity utilization while enhancing backup and restore times including support for windowless backup.

Friedman detailed an example of the system's snapshot potential.  "We tested iSN's snapshot capabilities by mounting and running an Oracle 9i with a 20Gb database on a Cloverleaf volume.  The snapshot was created in less than one second, and the restore from the snapshot only took another few seconds.  This demonstrated how snapshots can be created throughout a business day without disruption to applications, an important function to help protect against data loss by being able to quickly recover from a serious situation.  The restore time impressed us, especially considering restore from tape usually takes us many hours."

Additionally, iSN contains cost and provides application development efficiencies with its ability to deliver writeable snapshots.  These 'virtual replicas' provide users with an instantaneous virtual copy of a complete application that can be used for parallel QA testing, development and training without using excess capacity or disrupting mission-critical applications.  IT staff is more productive as they can work with fresh data more often while continuing to improve capacity utilization.

Friedman commented, "Using the same 20GB Oracle database, we re-ran the test with a virtual replica, which is perfect for testing new applications before implementing them in production and for training.  Not only was the virtual replica created just as quickly as the snapshot but both production and test databases were able to run at the same time without corrupting or disrupting each other.  This technology is very compelling for us as it can not only save an enormous amount of storage capacity and time but also enable our quality engineers and developers to be much more productive by being able to work with exact, full copies of our live data."

Cloverleaf's iSN also provides high availability services as diskless servers can boot off the Cloverleaf system using virtual replicas.  Since virtual replicas require minimal storage capacity, utilization is maximized and the number of network servers can be reduced.  Also, diskless servers become more reliable as they have less mechanical parts and be hot-swapped if part of a clustered application.

The Cloverleaf system also provides non-disruptive growth through sparse volumes.  Application servers can 'spoof' the operating system, oversubscribing to the maximum amount of capacity addressable but then only be allocated the actual physical space currently needed.  When the application needs to grow, iSN automatically allocates capacity for 'just-in-time' addition of storage.

Pricing and Availability

Generally available with this announcement, iSN will provide most of the above mentioned services for the price of about $240,000 for an entry level system, upgradeable both in computation power and bandwidth support and in software services add-ons.

About Cloverleaf Communications

Cloverleaf Communications Inc., established in May 2001 as a spin-off of Elta Systems, has developed a unique and proven intelligent storage networking system for the efficient management and non-disruptive scaling of heterogeneous data center infrastructures across technologies, products and vendors.  Based on technology from Cloverleaf's parent company ELTA Systems, a large technology powerhouse affiliated with Israel Aircraft Industries, Cloverleaf's core technology has already been tested and proven with very-high performance and secure communications systems in defense and commercial applications.  Cloverleaf is privately held.  For more information contact Cloverleaf at 2 Willow Street, Southborough, MA 01745, 508-624-9500 or visit www.cloverleafcomm.com.