PROCESSORS

StorageTek, the world's most trusted partner for storing and managing critical business information, today announced several enhancements to its market-leading StreamLine SL8500 modular tape library. The enhancements, which will give customers even more options to archive and protect their business data, include support for the market's fastest, highest-capacity tape drive from HP, as well as new options for enterprise environments and a continued commitment to open standards. "Our High-Performance Computing (HPC) product portfolio consists of the national Supercomputer TERAS/ASTER and several other supercomputers with a variety of architectures," said Eric Heemskerk, business development manager at SARA Computing and Networking Services. "To manage the ferociously expanding amount of data generated by these supercomputers, we needed a storage solution that was not only robust, but also technically superior. The SL8500 will not only help accommodate the future growth of our data center, but also provides us with an extremely scalable solution, which is ideal for consolidating many of the smaller libraries of our customers. It also enables our company to ensure our high-value data is well-protected, yet easily accessible, at a much lower cost." Infocamere, which operates the national data system linking Italy's 103 Chambers of Commerce and 300 branch offices, uses the StreamLine SL8500 to manage the increased flow of data running through its business. "The StreamLine SL8500 has already been adopted by nearly 400 customers over the past year, and today's announcement will significantly broaden the modular tape library's potential customer base," said Jon Benson, vice president and general manager of the Automated Tape Solutions Group at StorageTek. "We know that our customers are forced to do more with tighter budgets, so we are aggressively improving the SL8500 to give them what they demand -- more storage space, increased performance, higher availability, online upgrades and superior enterprise-class connectivity and service." In addition to StorageTek's premier 9840 and 9940 enterprise tape drives, the StreamLine SL8500 now supports the mid-range market's fastest tape drive -- HP's third-generation Linear Tape-Open(TM) (LTO(R)) Ultrium (LTO-3). The HP LTO-3 Ultrium, which will begin shipping in the SL8500 in June, offers write-once, read-many (WORM) functionality that customers are demanding to more cost effectively address growing compliance requirements. With 400GB uncompressed capacity, the LTO-3 doubles the capacity of the LTO-2, and its 80MB/sec data transfer rate more than doubles the performance of the LTO-2. In addition to being available with the StreamLine SL8500, the LTO-3 tape drive is currently available and shipping on StorageTek's legacy L180, L700e and L1400M tape libraries. Additional StreamLine SL8500 Enhancements for the Enterprise Market In addition to the expanded tape-drive support, the StreamLine SL8500 offers enterprise customers even more technology, software and standards support, including: * Virtual Storage Manager (VSM) and SL8500 support: Mainframe customers have attached VSM capabilities to maximize tape-cartridge capacity, resulting in more efficient use of tape drives, increased productivity and lower management costs. StorageTek now offers SL8500 customers an upgraded version of VSM that provides near-continuous operations that let customers change tape drives dynamically without interrupting service. * Pass-Thru Ports: With its unique StreamLine(TM) RealTime Growth capability, customers can grow and add performance, for applications other than archives, to their SL8500 environment via pass-thru ports. Real-time addition of more drives, slots and robots to an existing SL8500 can be achieved via two to 32 pass-thru ports without interrupting the continuous operation of the library. * Host Software Component (HSC) Library Management Software Support/NCO: StorageTek recently introduced its Host Software Component (HSC) library management software version 6.1, designed to enable the management of StorageTek's automated tape libraries in MVS environments. Working with this enhanced software, StorageTek's SL8500 permits Near Continuous Operations (NCO) support so that customers can dynamically add or remove library panels of additional slots, more tape drives and even more libraries to an existing system. * Common Information Model (CIM) Support: Underscoring the company's commitment to open storage management standards, StorageTek recently announced its statement of direction to support the Common Information Model (CIM) and Storage Management Information (SMI) specification for Storage Area Network (SAN)-based storage management. CIM has been endorsed by the Storage Network Industry Association (SNIA) as the technology that will enable simplified multi-vendor management of storage networks. As an active participant in SNIA's CIM Storage Media Library (SML) technical working group for tape library storage, StorageTek has been a contributor to the standards that will provide industry wide benefits to large and small businesses. General availability of the StorageTek CIM Provider for libraries and ACSLS software environments is expected by mid-2005. Customers Value the StreamLine SL8500's Reliability and Scalability Customers who are protecting and archiving their business data with the StreamLine SL8500 include SARA Computing and Networking Services, Infocamere, and Cineca. SARA Computing and Networking Services, an advanced IT service center that offers a complete package of high-performance, network and infrastructure services, uses the StreamLine SL8500 for back-up and data migration. "The increase in size of our business caused our data to grow tremendously and accelerated our need to archive and protect, causing storage management problems," said Roberto Fontanella, head of operating support architecture, network and services at Infocamere. "Using the SL8500, we've consolidated our data from six libraries to one, with mixed media supporting different operating systems. With the help of StorageTek's SL8500, we've been able to save and protect our investments and simplify infrastructure management". Sergio Bernardi, the head of systems management at Cineca, an inter-university consortium in Italy, said, "The success of our services depends on effectively storing and accessing large amounts of data necessary to the scientific research of the 24 universities in our consortium. The SL8500 provides us with the ideal solution to manage our information at a lower cost. It also offers unmatched consolidation capabilities, high availability, performance and scalability -- all without taking up much data center space."