Ciprico Launches Series, Controllers

MINNEAPOLIS -- Ciprico Inc. (NASDAQ: CPCI), a leading provider of intelligent storage software,solutions and appliances, announced today that it is starting volumeproduction of its new RAIDCore(TM) RC5000 line of SAS and SATA II RAID controllers. A successor to Ciprico's earlier 4000 series, thenew controllers promise a new level of performance at a lowerprice-point for Windows(TM) and Linux(TM) servers, workstations,personal computers and other embedded storage appliances employingRAID level protection. The company is demonstrating the new cardsthis week at Gartner's IT Visions conference in Hollywood, Florida.

"The new RC5000 series marks our first significant step into theenterprise IT and hybrid digital media-IT storage markets," said SteveMerrifield, president and chief executive officer for Ciprico. "TheRAIDCore software with the RC5000 series of products gives us asignificantly stronger core competence in host RAID software thatcomplements our existing core hardware RAID business. Given thesubstantial processing power now provided by today's multi-core CPUs,over the next several months and years we see a rapid shift towardpure software-based RAID implementations inside of serversaccelerated by products such as the new RC5000 family. Software-basedRAID significantly reduces overall system costs and offers improvedperformance."

The new RC5000 series controllers provide support for the latestserial attached SCSI (SAS) and serial ATA II (SATA II) specifications,as well as supporting both the traditional PCI-X(TM) and newer PCIExpress(R) bus standards. Shipping in May will be the 8 port versionsof the 5000 family, specifically the low profile PCI-X basedRC5110-08 and RC5152-08 boards, along with the RC5210-08 andRC5252-08 PCIe boards. All versions support the new mini-SAS SFF8087connectors. Mid-year, the company plans to ship higher port count 12and 16 port SAS/SATA II boards, RC5252-12 and RC5252-16, based on therecently announced Marvell 6640 SAS/SATA II controller chip. The newsoftware drivers released with the 5000 series boards will supportWindows(TM) and Linux(TM) operating systems, and are fully compatiblewith the earlier 4000 series. The company expects to offer supportfor Intel(R) and nVidia(R) based motherboards as part of its next

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