KOM Partners With Dell To Feed One Million Hungry Children By Recycling Obsolete Storage Hardware

Ottawa, Canada  December 15, 2009  KOM Networks, world leading provider of storage management solutions for secure archiving compliant data protection and retention, today announced the Junk-A-Juke program. A unique program that will collect and recycle obsolete and legacy storage equipment and donate all the money generated from raw materials to Feed The Children. In exchange for the older equipment, KOM offers a new Dell Powered KOMpliance Archive with equal capacity and superior performance, a fully compliant enterprise class server and archive solution free-of-charge with a three year maintenance agreement. KOM's goal is to collect and recycle enough hardware to feed one million children!

Working jointly with Dell's OEM division, KOM developed their custom storage solution on the Dell PowerVault NX3000 NAS. "Dell OEM is a strategic supplier to KOM providing the platform of choice for the KOMpliance archive server and storage and at the same time delivering a global service coverage that few can match in this global economy," said Taher Shaath, CEO at KOM Networks. "Teaming up with Dell OEM is a great benefit with the varying financial services that are available to help offset any costs associated with this program and minimize the impact on the customer's bottom line."

"We are proud to work with KOM Networks to help make this program a reality. The level of commitment and ambitious goals of this initiative are very commendable. Our mutual customers will benefit, the earth will benefit and most importantly the proceeds benefit a good cause," said Rick Froehlich, vice president and general manager of Dell OEM Solutions.

The first system has already been donated from aptly named Angel Medical Center in Franklin, NC. "We already had plans to upgrade our current system and were impressed with KOM's ability to help us easily migrate our data and meet our HIPAA compliance standards," said Gary Hanold, director of information systems at Angel Medical. "Being able to bring in this highly regarded solution without additional cost and guarantee that our end-of-life jukebox doesn't end up in a landfill is valuable. Feeding kids in a time when many families are struggling is invaluable."

KOMpliance is a plug-and-play archive solution that is platform and application agnostic to easily integrate into any existing infrastructure. More than 10,000 of the world's leading organizations use KOM solutions to protect, access and manage their data and meet their compliance standards. With this innovative program, not only is KOM making it effortless to responsibly discard obsolete hardware and help feed many of the twelve million American children who are today at risk of going hungry; but also lowering all financial barriers and making it easy and affordable to upgrade old data archive and storage technology to get compliant.

"Gartner's market research indicates a healthy demand for active archiving solutions, and file-based archiving solutions are a fast growing segment of this market," said Sheila Childs, Research Director with Gartner. "While file archiving technologies enable better management of storage growth and cost, an organization's requirement to retain information for long periods of time often necessitates continued replacement of inefficient, antiquated and obsolete hardware to preserve data in readable formats." 

"When times are tough, businesses need to be more responsible in helping out where they can, so we tried to think about ways we could help. There are still large numbers of obsolete archive and storage devices being used," said Kamel Shaath, CTO of KOM Networks. "Our free storage upgrade to KOMpliance will increase efficiency, protect data, and lower liability, risk and TCO; but the opportunity to protect our planet for future generations and feed hungry children today is our motivation. KOM will match the funds generated by the recycled hardware to help Feed The Children."

KOM has partnered with Technology Conservation Group (TCG) to pick up and track each piece of equipment through destruction to ensure that nothing ends up in a landfill. TCG is an ISO registered recycler of electronic scrap and a member of NAID, the National Association for Information Destruction, a trade association providing the standards and ethics for the information destruction industry to ensure total compliant destruction of functional drives. "As a partner, we are excited to play an active role in this fantastic campaign and are pleased to announce that we have committed to reduce the processing costs by 25% to increase the value of the proceeds that will be donated to Feed The Children," said Hamilton Rice, president of Technology Conservation Group, Inc.