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StorageTek Unveils T9940B Tape Drive

StorageTek (Storage Technology Corp), a storage services and solutions expert, has announced limited availability of the T9940B tape drive, which delivers breakthrough performance and cost savings to its customers.

The fastest, highest-capacity tape drive advances the company's leadership position as a provider of best-in-class storage devices, enhanced management capabilities and replication solutions. Additionally, StorageTek continues to expand its leadership in the high-end tape storage device market by building upon the success of its market leading family of tape drives.

"Since we laid out the roadmap, our customers have been driving us to bring this product to market. The inherent value it brings to customers is very exciting and allows customers to solve many problems that previously were very expensive or impossible to solve," said Gary Francis, StorageTek corporate vice president and general manager, Automated Tape Solutions.

"StorageTek's T9840/T9940 family of tape products has become a de facto industry standard and has propelled StorageTek into the market lead position in this sector. StorageTek continues to drive innovation with the new T9940B and extends its technology leadership and market position," said Bob Abraham, Freeman Reports president.

"The introduction of the T9940B tape drive demonstrates StorageTek's commitment to high-performance tape technology," said Robert Amatruda, research manager at IDC. "StorageTek's T9940B will address customer challenges of executing reliable back-ups with ever-shrinking back-up windows."

The StorageTek T9940B is the ideal tape storage device for customers needing to collect, move and store large volumes of critical data quickly and with the highest possible reliability. By delivering unmatched data transfer rates, storage capacity, high duty cycle reliability and significantly lowered failure rates, the StorageTek T9940B allows customers to do more work in less time with fewer tape drives while achieving a superior standard of reliability. Ultimately, the StorageTek T9940B significantly lowers the total cost of ownership for customers requiring this scope of data protection, by offering the lowest cost-per-gigabyte-stored.

Giovanni Soldi, chairman and co-founder of SHS Multimedia commented, "We work with leading vendors such as StorageTek to integrate tailored digital video archiving solutions that offer real advantages to broadcasters. The latest storage technology found in the T9940B tape drive from StorageTek takes this digital revolution another step forward."

Francis added, "Our customers demand high-capacity, ultra-reliable and scalable data storage solutions across many operating environments. By offering a wide breadth of flexible storage products and spearheading support from industry-leading ISVs, we are ensuring that our customers can maximize the value of their storage infrastructures while reducing media and labor costs."

The T9940B provides the ultimate solution for data-intensive applications such as backup and recovery, archiving digital assets and scientific data acquisition and processing. It is the most cost-effective solution for the reliable, rapid, secure movement of highly valuable data across all networks and systems. Key features include:

• Industry-leading speed & capacity: Delivering 30 MB/second native data transfer (up to 252 GB/Hour, compressed) and 200GB(native) /cartridge capacity, the StorageTek T9940B provides unrivaled data movement, storage capacity and protection for today's data-intensive, high duty-cycle storage environments.
• Enhanced tape drive utilization: A single StorageTek T9940B tape drive can do the work of several mid-range tape drives. The StorageTek T9940B is designed for 70 percent tape motion duty cycles -- as close to 7x24 operation as you can get.
• Native 2 gigabit Fibre Channel (FC) interface: Like the fast access T9840B before it, the StorageTek T9940B also features a native 2 Gigabit Fibre Channel interface to enable seamless, high-speed connectivity for storage area network (SAN) environments. Direct native fabric connectivity ensures that customers can leverage the StorageTek T9940B to support their storage area networks without the need for an additional adaptor device.
• Lowest cost per gigabyte: The StorageTek T9940B offers the lowest cost per gigabyte stored at $0.47 per GB, list price. It further reduces customers' expenses by increasing overall tape storage capacity, ultimately reducing the number of necessary tape mounts, library slots and rack storage space. The StorageTek T9940B is backward read compatible with and uses the same tape cartridge as StorageTek's first-generation T9940A, protecting customers' media investments and extending the value and functionality of their StorageTek tape libraries.
• VolSafe technology: The StorageTek T9940B also features StorageTek's proprietary VolSafe advanced WORM (Write-Once-Read-Many) technology designed to support today's stringent electronic data storage regulatory mandates, including the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's "non-erasable and non-rewritable" requirements.

VolSafe for the StorageTek T9940B has the ability to maintain the integrity and preservation of legally sensitive data, as well as the ability to cost-effectively store and retrieve this information. VolSafe is a no-charge feature of all T9940B tape drives. 9940 VolSafe tape cartridges will be available for the T9940B drives in early 2003.

Pricing and Availability

The T9940B tape drive will be generally available worldwide in November. The native 2Gb Fibre Channel interface drive has a U.S. list price of $39,500.

About StorageTek

StorageTek, a $2 billion worldwide company with headquarters in Louisville, Colorado, delivers a broad range of storage solutions for digitized data. StorageTek solutions are easy to manage and allow universal access to data across servers, media types and storage networks. StorageTek is an innovator and global leader in virtual storage solutions for tape automation, disk storage systems and storage networking and is a voting member of the SNIA. Because of StorageTek, customers can manage and leverage their digital assets as their businesses grow and can maximize IT productivity to ensure enterprise-class business continuity. For more information, see www.storagetek.com, or call 800-786-7835.

Contact: Jason Knadler, Senior Product Marketing Manager, 303-673-5520, jason--knadler@storagetek.com.