NEW YORK, JANUARY 11, 2005— ExaStore 2.0, the high-performance, clustered NAS grid storage solution manufactured by Exanet, Inc., has been recognized by Storage magazine and SearchStorage.com as one of the top storage products of 2004. Storage magazine awarded ExaStore 2.0 a bronze medal in thedisk and disk subsystems category for 2004. “A network-attached storage (NAS) startup that received high praise from our judges for innovation and performance...,” is how Storage magazine described the ExaStore system in its award review. ExaStore won the award based on its superior capabilities in the following categories: innovation, performance, ease of integration into existing environments, ease of use and manageability, functionality, and value. The judges of the Storage magazine/SearchStorage.com awards included seasoned industry experts: analysts, consultants, Storage editorial staff, users, and others. ExaStore was selected from among more than 200 applicants for this prestigious award. “We consider this award to be a reinforcement of ExaStore’s superiority as a leading storage solution,” said Dr. Giora Yaron, chairman and CEO of Exanet.“This leading industry award officially recognizes ExaStore’s ability to provide theperformance and reliability previously only available in a storage-area network (SAN) system in an affordable network-attached storage (NAS)solution.” “ExaStore’s high reliability, high availability, virtualization capabilities, true distributed file system and distributed cache coherency system combined with its record-breaking performance levels contributed to the judges’ decision to recognize ExaStore as a superior storage solution,” said Clive Surfleet, Exanet’s chief strategy officer. “This award reinforces what our customers have long known.” ExaStore reached record-breaking performance of 203,182 operations per second (OPS) result on the industry-standard SPEC SFS benchmark with the Exanet EX600FC clustered network-attached storage (NAS) solution, with an overall response time of 1.08 seconds.  The ExaStore 2.0 software features no single point of failure in a full high-availability failover environment, with easy linear scaleability allowing any level of capacity and total performance desired in a system. Using industry-standard, commodity off-the-shelf hardware, ExaStore solutions reduce hardware acquisition and service costs and protect customers’ hardware investments. ExaStore storage solutions are available both with fibre channel and SATA disk RAID arrays, allowing customers to build an infinitely expandable storage system, based on Exanet’s proprietary grid storage architecture. “We chose ExaStore long before this award was announced, long before it reached those performance numbers,” said Todd Knipe, IT Director, Mercury Print Productions. “What this award reinforces is something I’ve known all along – ExaStore is the best solution for a high-availability, highly scalable, complex workflow environment.”