Features - Storage Innovations:

QUANTUM DELIVERS NEW TAPE DRIVE PERFORMANCE THRESHOLD

Quantum Corp, a leading provider of data protection systems, announced worldwide availability of SDLT 600, the industry's fastest performing super drive. Delivering more than twice the speed and built-in intelligent management capabilities, the SDLT 600 outpaces the nearest competitive mid-range tape storage offering with a new threshold for reliability, quality and performance. The SDLT 600 drive is further enhanced with the addition of Quantum's award winning DLTSage, fibre channel and SCSI connectivity and the industry's most advanced media in its class.

The SDLT 600 is ideal for automation and storage area network (SAN) environments, offering a 72 MB per second compressed transfer rate and 600GB compressed capacity. DLTSage, a suite of diagnostic and management tools available with all SDLT 600 drives, enhances tape automation environments by helping to ensure that data backups are completed successfully and that drives and media can be properly managed by IT administrators to prevent system outages. The SDLT 600, with its advanced feature set, is currently in qualification or scheduled to be so at all major system and automation OEMs.

"Quantum demonstrates its commitment and innovation to Super DLTtape with the SDLT 600 drive," said Robert Amatruda, IDC's research manager for tape and removable storage. "The SDLT 600 delivers more capacity, performance and manageability with the predictive diagnostics of DLTSage."

The newest member of the DLTtape family, SDLT 600 is backward-read compatible with the SDLT 320, SDLT 220 and DLT VS160 drives, allowing customers to protect their existing investments while maximizing DLTtape technology as the cornerstone of their enterprise and distributed storage environments. Specific product details can be found at www.dlttape.com.

"By listening to our customers, Quantum has more than met their key requirements with industry leading performance and reliability," said George Kreigler, senior vice president and general manager of Quantum's DLTtape Group. "The SDLT 600 also demonstrates our customer commitment to new levels of manageability for tape storage environments with DLTSage delivering true enterprise uptime."

SDLT 600 Receives Broad Industry Acceptance And Support

Key to new technology adoption is the support of the entire solutions ecosystem, a system comprised of automation providers, storage software ISVs and major systems providers. Customers can expect to receive SDLT 600 drive shipments in the fourth calendar quarter of 2003.

"DLTtape's focus on manageability offers ADIC the ability to increase overall system reliability for enterprise backup," said Scott Roza, vice president of North American Storage Products at ADIC. "The SDLT 600 and its DLTSage technology coupled with the intelligent monitoring and alerting of ADIC's Scalar libraries provide IT managers a proactive, automated system for detecting and correcting potential problems before they interfere with backup operations."

"Eclipsing the speed and intelligent manageability of current super drives available in the mid-market, the SDLT 600 will be a welcome addition to our storage solutions," said Bob Scroop, vice president and general manager of the storage resource business unit at Overland Storage. "The SDLT 600 is an ideal solution for protecting customers' mission-critical data within our NEO SERIES libraries, PowerLoader and stand-alone tape drives."

"The SDLT 600 super drive provides the speed, manageability and capacity that will enable our customers to realize even greater benefit from our highly reliable and very dense automation systems," said Rob Pickell, vice president of worldwide marketing for Quantum's Storage Solutions Group. "From our popular autoloaders for SMB and workgroups, to our mid-tier and enterprise libraries, customers will see a new level of automation system performance and capacity."

The SDLT 600 is receiving support from prominent storage ISVs, including Arkeia Corporation, CommVault Systems, Computer Associates, Legato Systems, VERITAS and Yosemite Technologies, as well as storage network manufacturer QLogic.

Intelligent And Predictive Diagnostics Of DLTSage Assures Greater Reliability

DLTSage allows users to better understand and control how tape drive units are used throughout the enterprise. The DLTSage suite will ship with the SDLT 600 and all future Super DLTtape solutions at no additional charge, and is available for download for existing Super DLTtape products. Additional information can be found at www.dltsage.com.

"The performance of SDLT 600, combined with the greater reliability and improved management available through DLTSage, is a tremendous value to Super DLTtape customers," said Bob Abraham, president of Freeman Reports. "Quantum realized the need for increased manageability support through an intuitive diagnostic application, and the company continues to deliver true innovation to the tape market with the combination of SDLT 600 and DLTSage."

New Super DLTtape II Media Enables High Performance Of SDLT 600

Accompanying the availability of SDLT 600 will be new Super DLTtape II media tape cartridges, the most advanced media in its class. The Super DLTtape II magnetic recording layer is thinner and its magnetic particle size 40 percent smaller than the previous generation, providing superior reliability, the highest capacity and lowest cost per gigabyte of any media in the mid-range. The Super DLTtape II media establishes a new standard for the most demanding automation, enterprise and stand-alone applications for backup, restore and archiving.

Fibre Channel Connectivity Available For Super DLTtape Family

Fibre channel connectivity is available with the SDLT 600 and SDLT 320 drives for DLTtape customers with SAN environments who want to leverage the high-performance capabilities of SDLT drives.