StoneAge.com Taps XIOtech to Manage Booming Car Buyer Information

    EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn.--July 30, 2002--XIOtech, a wholly owned subsidiary of Seagate Technology and a networked storage pioneer, has been selected by one of the top three car-buying services in the U.S. to provide easy-to-manage storage for their booming data. StoneAge.com currently does business with over 2 million consumers and hundreds of car dealers every month.
    StoneAge.com has grown 2,677% in the last 5 years. The company's data needs have been increasing exponentially as well. In addition to adding car-buyers every month, StoneAge.com also handles automotive finance contracts for dealers, including thousands of credit applications a month. The credit applications include image files, which require large amounts of storage. StoneAge.com expects the number of applications to triple in the near future.
    "XIOtech came in and blew away the competition," said Matt McDonald, Chief Internet Officer for StoneAge.com. Competition included EMC, IBM and NetworkAppliance. "One competitor's box was impossible to understand and to manage--even the representative couldn't get it to do everything it was supposed to do. When we went for a demo at XIOtech, they handed the keyboard over to one of my system administrators, and all of a sudden we were booting servers from the SAN, creating virtual discs, copying data, and expanding virtual discs on the fly. XIOtech's approach is great: it's so simple to use, and it just makes sense."
    Previously, StoneAge.com used direct-attached storage, but McDonald explained, "Our biggest concern was having all this storage space that was not manageable. It was a nightmare." StoneAge.com also wanted to cluster servers for 100 percent uptime. The only way to create that high-availability environment was to share storage between servers using a centralized, networked storage platform.
    "StoneAge.com is an innovative, fast-growing company for which our adaptable, scalable storage is a great fit," said Dan McCormick, XIOtech's Vice President of Worldwide Marketing. "We're pleased to provide a networked storage foundation that is easy to manage today and will grow with their business, not only in terms of capacity but in performance and flexibility as well."
    Currently, StoneAge.com is running a combination of Microsoft(R) SQL Server databases and other applications on XIOtech's MAGNITUDE(TM) hardware platform. They have seven servers attached through a dual switch fabric and plan to grow that number to 15 within six months. They will also move to booting their servers from the MAGNITUDE hardware platform, enabling them to use diskless thin servers.

    About StoneAge.com

    StoneAge.com does business with 2 million consumers and over hundreds of dealers each month. In addition to its "Road to Ownership" referral service, the company has expanded into the financing segment with StoneAge Financial. StoneAge.com is the only company to receive PC Magazine's highly coveted EXCELLENT designation in the online car buying industry. StoneAge is listed in the Media Matrix Top 500 websites in the U.S. and ranked among the top 9 by PC Data Online. Ranked among the top three online car-buying services in the United States, StoneAge.com was founded in 1996 and is headquartered in Metro Detroit. StoneAge is a privately held company, which has grown 2,677% in the last 5 years, and has been profitable in the last four years. It currently employs a staff of 80 and occupies 23,000 square feet of office space in Troy, Michigan. For more information about StoneAge.com, visit the web site at www.stoneage.com, or call 1-800-STONEAGE.

    About XIOtech

    XIOtech Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Seagate, develops comprehensive networked storage solutions and was the first in the industry to develop true storage virtualization. XIOtech's virtualized storage architecture--comprised of the MAGNITUDE(TM) hardware platform and REal-Time Data Intelligence (REDI(TM)) software family--incorporates all the components of networked storage foundation into a tightly integrated, easy-to-manage, highly available configuration. XIOtech's virtualized storage architecture makes storing, managing, safeguarding, and retrieving data on heterogeneous computing platforms easy and cost effective. For more information, visit XIOtech's Web site at www.xiotech.com, call (952) 983-3000, or email info@xiotech.com.

    About Seagate

    Seagate is the world's leading provider of storage technology for Internet, business, and consumer applications. The company's products include disc drives for the enterprise, PC, and consumer electronics markets, as well as networked storage solutions. Seagate's market leadership is based on delivering award-winning products, customer support, and reliability to meet the world's growing demand for information storage. Seagate can be found around the globe and at www.seagate.com.

    XIOtech is a registered trademark and MAGNITUDE and REDI are trademarks of XIOtech Corporation. Seagate and Seagate Technology are registered trademarks of Seagate Technology LLC. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners