ONI Systems' Advances in Storage Networking Generate New Business

COLT Telecommunications, KVH Telecom and Telseon Deliver Storage Services to Enterprises via ONI Platforms


SAN JOSE, Calif., April 16, 2002 (PRIMEZONE) -- ONI Systems Corp. (Nasdaq:ONIS) today announced that COLT Telecommunications, KVH Telecom and Telseon have begun leveraging the storage internetworking functionalities of ONI's ONLINE(tm) transport platform and are successfully selling into the enterprise storage market in Europe, Japan and the United States, respectively.

ONI's storage internetworking solution delivers unprecedented Fibre Channel and ESCON densities, distance extension up to thousands of kilometers, and advanced performance monitoring capabilities. Deployments to-date have been for both synchronous and asynchronous data replication and have leveraged ONI's leading ONWAVE(tm) portfolio. Customers have welcomed the system as a means to better serve their customer needs.

COLT Telecommunications

"One of our customers, an international provider of business continuity and IT services, required a storage connectivity solution to enable applications, such as remote mirroring and remote backup. The combination of EMC and ONI paired with our services provided a solution that met our customers' objectives," said Stephen Beddow, marketing director for COLT Telecommunications.

KVH

"We have been working with one of the largest financial institutions in Tokyo to store its mission-critical data in geographically redundant locations, to protect against both man-made and natural disasters. Our key requirements were high availability, density, and manageability. EMC and ONI, each leaders in their respective markets, were able to deliver a solution which was very attractive to our customer," said Yoshishige Nakamichi, managing director of Corporate Sales for KVH in Japan.

Telseon

"Our customer, an international business and information technology consulting firm, desired to implement a disaster recovery application, using a SRDF backup and restore solution over the MAN. Working with the qualified solution from EMC and ONI, and teaming with the customer, Telseon was able to present an effective, integrated solution in half the typical timeframe," said George Chung, senior director of Product Management for Telseon.

"ONI can significantly reduce the total cost of ownership for our customers and provide them with a highly intelligent solution to scale with their business," said Peter Evans, senior vice president of Marketing at ONI Systems. "It is not enough to say we can meet requirements today -- we also have to anticipate future requirements. For instance, ONI delivers a platform today that can scale to support several generations of storage interconnect, including ESCON, Fibre Channel, FICON, Gigabit Ethernet, 2 Gigabit Fibre Channel, as well as the next generation of 10 Gigabit services. We have forged the required relationships with leading storage vendors, and continue to add technologies that enable our customers to deliver the services required to be a leader in this space."

Related News

ONI Systems also announced that ONI's ONLINE7000 and ONLINE9000 optical transport platforms have been qualified by EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC) as E-Lab Tested(tm), the industry's most comprehensive testing program. The qualification process included testing of both Fibre Channel and ESCON with ONI's ONWAVE Data Multiplexer and ONWAVE ESCON Multiplexer and EMC Symmetrix(r) and CLARiiON(r) information storage systems and Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF(tm)) and MirrorView(tm) remote mirroring software. ONI and EMC have entered into a worldwide Cooperative Support Agreement to address joint customer service and support (see "ONI Systems Optical Platforms Qualified by EMC Corporation as E-Lab Tested -- Information Storage Solution Deployed At Customer Sites").

About ONI Systems

ONI Systems (Nasdaq:ONIS) develops, markets and sells optical networking equipment specifically designed to address bandwidth and service limitations of regional and metropolitan networks. Our products allow communication service providers to rapidly build high-capacity networks that are flexible, scalable and able to support multiple services on a single platform. ONI's headquarters is located at 5965 Silver Creek Valley Road, San Jose, CA 95138. For additional information about ONI and its products, visit the company Web site at www.oni.com.

ONI Systems, ONI, the ONI logo, ONLINE, OPTX, OLMP and ONWAVE are trademarks or registered trademarks of ONI Systems Corp. EMC, CLARiiON and Symmetrix are registered trademarks and E-Lab Tested, MirrorView and SRDF are trademarks of EMC Corporation. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and is subject to the safe harbor created by this section. Except for historical information, the matters discussed in this press release are forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. Such risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, our limited operating history which makes forecasting our future revenue and operating results difficult, unfavorable economic and market conditions which could cause our existing and potential customers to delay or forgo purchases of our products, risks associated with our proposed merger with CIENA Corporation, our ability to develop and to achieve market acceptance of new products, our dependence on a small number of customers and our ability to add additional customers. These and other risks and uncertainties are described in ONI Systems' filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including ONI Systems' annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2001 and other documents on file with the SEC.


            

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