SCIENCE

SCOTTS VALLEY, CA -- Seagate Technology and XIOtech(R) Corporation today announced that Seagate's Cheetah X15 36LP disc drives have been tested, certified, and are immediately available for integration with XIOtech's MAGNITUDE(TM) SAN. By incorporating Seagate's 15K-rpm, 36 gigabyte (GB) disc drive into the MAGNITUDE hardware platform, users will experience instant increases in enterprise performance as time-to-data is substantially reduced. The MAGNITUDE SAN's virtualized architecture allows simultaneous access to as many as 64 drives, providing the highest possible I/O performance in a multi-drive environment. The combination of XIOtech's virtualization technology and the Seagate 15K-rpm drives, which offer unbeatable I/O performance at the disc level, provides industry-leading data delivery to users. In addition, the MAGNITUDE SAN's virtualized architecture easily adapts to new disc drives when they are first introduced. Because of this, users can take immediate advantage of improvements in throughput and capacity, and they can mix their currently installed drives with new drives of differing speeds and capacities, thus protecting their IT investments. "Our business depends on the ability to continuously access data quickly and reliably. We found the combination of the XIOtech MAGNITUDE SAN along with Seagate's 15K-rpm drives to be an outstanding solution for our data-intensive environment," stated Vic Pigoga, director of Data/Voice Communications for Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island. "The ability of XIOtech's MAGNITUDE SAN to adapt to new technologies instantly, and for us to be able to upgrade without downtime, translates into tangible business benefits for our company." "We developed the X15 36LP drive to be the fastest and most reliable drive for business-critical data," stated Brian Dexheimer, Seagate executive vice president, Worldwide Sales, Marketing and Customer Service. "It's an excellent drive for XIOtech's enterprise customers who place their most valuable data on their MAGNITUDE SAN, and who must have access to this information in real time in their 24 x 7 x forever server environments." "We are proud to deliver to our enterprise customers the most flexible and compatible storage architecture available in the industry today," stated Richard Blaschke, executive vice president of marketing for XIOtech. "Because of our superior SAN technology, our customers can quickly incorporate leading-edge technology -- such as the fastest disc drives in the world -- shortly after it's been introduced, offering them nearly an instant return on investment as well as a 'new and improved' storage network certain to please their users." For further information visit www.xiotech.com