SAN DIEGO, CA., August 2, 2000 - ePhone Inc., a leading provider of preferred customer contact solutions for e-commerce, today announced it has chosen BakBone Software's (TSE: BKB, OTCBB: BKBOF) NetVault™ storage management software to protect its entire corporate computing infrastructure with a daily backup load of around 500 gigabytes.

ePhone adds voice capability to e-business web sites, including an IP telephony application that enables e-commerce customers to talk directly to sales representatives via their computer, at a fraction of the cost of traditional toll-free services.

ePhone's billing system tracks customer usage on a minute-by-minute basis, with the data used to create monthly invoices. ePhone selected NetVault to secure this critical billing data on a daily basis, realizing that the loss of even a single day's data would cost the company tens of thousands of dollars in lost revenue. ePhone uses NetVault software with Sony AIT tape drives to backup all company operations, including the billing system, across a wide range of platforms, including Sun Solaris, Oracle, Windows NT, Red Hat Linux and Microsoft Exchange Server.

ePhone turned to NetVault after an aborted venture with another software vendor, which left the company frustrated and solutionless. The decision to go with BakBone has provided ePhone with a robust backup solution set, said Arash Noorai, President of ePhone. "NetVault is a much more full-featured product. We were also impressed by BakBone's superior customer support," he commented. "They were extremely helpful from the get go. Their support staff has been there every single time we have had a question and they have bent over backwards to help integrate into our production environments."

"Most companies I've dealt with don't go to the lengths that BakBone has gone to for us," Noorai continue. "Their support people are there all the time. They have been wonderful."

The storage management challenges faced by ePhone are shared by all companies regardless of size, said Jack Corrao, BakBone's President and Chief Operating Officer: how to deploy a solution that allows them to simply and effectively manage and protect their current storage assets, yet has enough flexibility to easily handle anticipated future growth.

"Companies of all sizes, from emerging ones like ePhone to global enterprises, are seeing their storage needs grow exponentially," said Corrao. "NetVault's modular architecture enables enterprises to meet today's backup capabilities and the scalability to anticipate their needs tomorrow, even if those needs change sharply. NetVault does this through its clear focus on ease of use throughout the entire process, from installation and operation to scalability and support," he added.

About NetVault

NetVault is centralized enterprise storage management software, featuring the ability to easily manage the most intensive backup, restore and archiving functions across a wide range of computer platforms. NetVault's scalable, advanced modular architecture operates across distributed heterogeneous client/server and multi-user environments, and is specifically designed for the next generation of network storage applications, such as storage area networks (SANs), as well as today's requirements.

NetVault addresses the needs of every data center today. From small workgroup environments to enterprise-level Fibre Channel storage area networking, NetVault has the capability needed to solve today's storage needs, and easily scales to meet the demands of future growth. NetVault creates a new benchmark for simplicity and ease of use, breaking the frustrating bottleneck of traditional storage management solutions. They can be maddeningly complex to install, often taking up to several days to implement, due to the design complexity of configuration, device setup and multiple management utilities.

With NetVault, these same requirements can now be finished within minutes and hours, rather than days and weeks, providing users with a significant time and cost advantage. The streamlined, easy-to-use software provides a simplified method of installation, auto detection of devices for easy configuration, advanced scheduling options and on-line help screens that are unparalleled in today's storage management environments.

NetVault's modular architecture features:

• DirecSAN™, a NetVault exclusive, that enables data to bypass backup servers on a SAN, dramatically simplifying the process, reducing potential bottlenecks associated with SAN-based backup and maximizing both performance and return on investment;
• a standard core architecture;
• scaleable device support for expanding the number of tape drives, libraries and slots; and
• installable application plug-in modules (APM™) for seamless interfacing with business applications such as Oracle, Informix, Sybase and SAP.

These features ensure that customers have constant access to the mission-critical knowledge needed to run their business. As technology and software advances occur, NetVault easily integrates new applications and support quickly through a plug-in based architecture, without the need to modify its core component. This provides users with the assurance that the solution they implement today will grow with them as their data storage needs escalate.

For more information on ePhone, contact the company at 800-819-2571, or check the company's home page at www.ephone-inc.com.