FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Darma Releases NAS OS Network Attached Storage Operating System to OEMs and System Builders

Tempe, AZ - August 27, 2003 - Darma today announced its network attached storage operating system for OEMs and system builders who manufacture NAS servers, NAS-SAN gateways, and disk-based backup appliances. The Darma NAS OS represents a major step forward from products that use an ordinary web server for critical fileserver management. The technology behind the Darma NAS OS is an encrypted Java client-server approach that delivers datacenter-level security and performance along with an easy to use graphical user interface (GUI).

The Darma NAS OS is an open-standards Linux-based operating system with a small footprint of approximately 32 Megabytes. OEMs will typically embed the OS on flash memory for additional reliability. The Java GUI is managed thru a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) browser session and sports a familiar Windows-style look and feel. In addition to the security controls and graphical environment, the Darma NAS OS includes the following enterprise-level features:

• Logical Volume Management with dynamic volume expansion, storage aggregation, and virtualization
• Volume snapshot technology for instant point-in-time copy of data
• SGI's XFS high-performance journaling filesystem for rapid recovery and extremely large disk farms
• Access Control Lists (ACL) extended file permissions
• SMB / CIFS and NFS protocols for Windows, Unix, Linux, and Apple OS X networks
• Microsoft domain and Active Directory Services (ADS) integration
• Mirror local or network data from multiple sources to destinations; tape or disk backup and restore

Darma is currently working with its OEM customers to validate the operating system on their specialized NAS hardware. A number of white box system builders are also evaluating the operating system. The feedback so far is excellent, with excitement to use our product to upgrade or replace other operating systems.

Bill Johnson, president of Darma, says, "Our development efforts have yielded an efficient, secure, full featured, and low cost operating system that we envision to become the market leader. We invested a considerable amount of time in the architecture underneath the hood where others have not. We believe we will be successful in the markets that require better security and robust functionality."

Darma also unveiled today its roadmap for new features and optional components to compliment the base NAS OS. These features include the iSCSI protocol with target and initiator modes, clustering for high performance and availability, filesystem encryption for data security, integrated firewall and IPSec for increased network security, local virus scanner, and Common Information Model (CIM) support for storage management and virtualization. More technical and development information is available at the Darma NAS OS website: nas.darma.com.

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