Company expands senior management team with noted industry veterans

Menlo Park, CA — July 11, 2006 — Gear6, accelerating storage and delivering real time performance, today announced a $10 million round of funding led by InterWest Partners, and joined by previous investor U.S. Venture Partners (USVP). The financing will support the market entry of Gear6 solutions, designed to address the widening gap between increasingly powerful servers and constrained, disk-based storage systems. Deployed in the data center, Gear6 products eliminate bottlenecks and deliver guaranteed performance to existing storage infrastructures. These real time capabilities speed up applications, provide protection from peak load disruptions, and improve quality of service.

"Gear6 has designed a powerful technology base for solutions that remove barriers to speed and performance in the data center,” said Khaled Nasr, partner at InterWest. “The management team, chosen experts in storage, networking, and enterprise software, has identified a unique and compelling approach to boost existing enterprise infrastructure and increase productivity. We're enthusiastic about the market potential and eager to advance the roll out of this innovative technology."

The funding increases momentum for Gear6, and builds on other recent milestones:

• In 2005, the company recruited industry veterans Geoff Barrall and Rich Boberg to help shape the strategy for the Gear6 technology platform. Geoff Barrall is CEO, Trusted Data, and founder of BlueArc Corporation, the third leading US supplier of Enterprise NAS. Rich Boberg is a noted consultant and 12-year veteran in software development and management at NetApp, where he was employee number six.
• Starting in 2006, the company began an aggressive campaign to add storage networking experience to the senior management team that already included Matt Oberdorfer, Chief Technology Officer and Founder, and longtime veteran of high-performance computing. Martin Patterson, also an early Gear6 executive, was formerly Vice President of Engineering and a Founder of TerraSpring, a pioneer in data center virtualization and provisioning acquired by Sun to power their N1 roadmap.
• In January 2006, Tom Shea was appointed President and CEO of Gear6, selected for his years of management and execution experience. He was previously CEO of Mirra, developer of digital content production products which was sold to Seagate, and President and COO of Roxio, developer and publisher of digital media software and tools. The Roxio business began at Adaptec, during Shea's long tenure there, and spun out as a public company in 2001.
• In February 2006, Gary Orenstein joined the Gear6 executive team as Vice President of Marketing, chosen for his deep knowledge of the business value of innovative technology and his experience in storage networking. Orenstein served as Vice President of Marketing for Compellent, a modular enterprise storage provider. Orenstein was also co-founder of Nishan Systems, a leader in the IP storage market, acquired by McDATA.

"Gear6 has solid technology and leadership and is ready to seize the market opportunity for storage acceleration,” said Tom Shea, president and CEO of Gear6. “Aimed at the mainstream enterprise, our solutions dramatically reduce the time and complexity of achieving real time performance for critical business applications. We deliver unmatched capabilities, and do not require any changes to existing infrastructure &mdash this is true innovation. The financial support of our investors enables Gear6 to execute our plans and achieve a market leadership position."

About Gear6

Founded in 2002 as Engineered Intelligence, the company developed high-performance computing solutions using distributed, clustered architectures, which were deployed in conjunction with top-tier OEM partners.

In 2005, based on the widening gap between the increasing processing power of servers and lagging mechanical storage devices, the company invented additional technology that delivers scalable and transparent storage acceleration to mainstream enterprises. Gear6 solutions accelerate existing storage infrastructure for real time performance, eliminate bottlenecks, and guarantee transaction response times. These real time capabilities speed up applications, provide protection from peak load disruptions, and improve quality of service.

For more information call 877-GEAR-SIX (432-7749), email info@gear6.com or visit www.gear6.com.