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Press Release

Rackable Systems Unveils New Network Attached Storage (NAS) Solution
Featuring Scalability, Flexibility and High Performance

-- Company's Innovative NAS Appliance Provides Advanced Features at Economical Price --

MILPITAS, CALIF. - October 4, 2004 - Rackable Systems, Inc., a leading provider of compute and storage servers for scale out data center deployments, today announced the latest addition to its family of storage solutions with the new S3116-NAS Network Attached Storage server appliance. Built for data centers demanding an affordable yet high-performance Serial ATA (SATA)-based NAS solution, Rackable Systems' S3116-NAS server leverages industry-standard components and a robust feature set to provide a high-value, cost-effective alternative. Optimized for ease-of-use and simplified manageability, the S3116-NAS delivers features traditionally available only on much more expensive solutions.

"The emergence of commoditization in the storage market is driving the development of competitive, lower-cost NAS solutions," said Brad Nisbet, storage program manager with IDC. "Products like Rackable Systems' S3116-NAS appliance, which uses industry-standard components in an open architecture design, will help customers meet their cost and performance demands."

"With the launch of the S3116-NAS, customers no longer have to choose between a low-cost file server and a high-end, proprietary NAS solution," said Geoffrey Noer, senior director of storage products at Rackable Systems. "Rackable Systems' S3116-NAS server delivers the ease of management, compatibility and performance benefits that our customers demand—in an economical storage appliance that offers enterprise-level capability."

Featuring enterprise-grade, 100 percent duty cycle SATA disk drives and up to four terabytes of storage capacity, Rackable Systems' S3116-NAS appliance is designed for easy, rapid deployment with minimal administration and high availability. Leveraging a fully-integrated NAS software layer from Mountain View Data, the system delivers shared, heterogeneous access from Linux, UNIX, Windows and MacOS clients—based on an advanced journaling file system supporting snapshots. The S3116-NAS is ideal for a variety of applications, including video streaming, rich media archives and near-line storage.

"The Rackable Systems S3116-NAS server took only minutes to install, was incredibly easy to use and its performance surpassed our greatest expectations," said Chris Marks, president of Netfronts, a leading Web hosting provider. "Deploying this system has given us the ability to handle the traffic generated by 30,000 Web sites, which is four times what we support today."

S3116-NAS Key Features and Benefits

• Top-tier, industry-standard components provide high-end performance at economical acquisition cost
• Software enables superior manageability over direct-attached servers
• Easy-to-use GUI or command line interface for rapid deployment and maintenance
• Redundant power and superior thermal design for high availability
• Snapshot and snapshot scheduling for fast data recovery
• NFS, CIFS and Appletalk protocols, with NIS and Windows PDC/Active Directory support
• Email alert notification
• Support for leading back-up software

Availability
The S3116-NAS is available immediately. For further information, please contact Rackable Systems at 408-240-8300 or visit www.rackable.com.

About Rackable Systems' Storage Solutions
Rackable Systems' storage servers offer a cost-effective solution for customers with high capacity storage requirements. Like its compute server offerings, Rackable Systems' storage products offer flexible configurations tailored to customers' data center environments. With density levels of up to 336 drives per cabinet and 100TB of storage, Rackable Systems' broad range of storage offerings includes file system and application servers—and now features the S3116-NAS appliance. Leveraging an open architecture approach and industry-standard components, Rackable Systems storage servers are available in both half-depth and full-depth form factors, offering a lower total cost of ownership with the benefit of world-class customer support.

About Rackable Systems
Rackable Systems, Inc. is a leading provider of compute and storage servers for scale out data center deployments. The company's patented server designs feature key competitive advantages in the areas of density, thermal efficiency, serviceability, power distribution and remote management. Driven by a fierce commitment to superior innovation and customer service, Rackable Systems is one of North America's top server vendors. Founded in 1999 and based in San Jose, California, Rackable Systems customers include Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, nVidia, Tellme Networks, Toshiba America Electronic Components, U.C.S.C. Human Genome Project, Webex and Yahoo!.

To learn more about Rackable Systems, visit www.rackable.com, call 408-240-8300, or email info@rackable.com.

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