Features - Storage Innovations:

StorageTek EXPANDS VIRTUAL STORAGE MANAGER CAPABILITIES

Customer demand has helped make StorageTek's Virtual Storage Manager (VSM) one of the most popular virtual tape storage solutions on the market. And now, VSM 4 offers even more capacity at greater speeds and with more connectivity options -- saving businesses even more resources while managing their data centers.

StorageTek (Storage Technology Corp), a storage services and solutions expert, now offers a newly enhanced Virtual Storage Manager (VSM) virtual tape solution, featuring performance and connectivity enhancements that extend the value and power of StorageTek's VSM platform. With VSM 4, customers in mainframe environments can achieve breakthrough gains in storage performance, capacity, connectivity, resource utilization and overall functionality to help them manage data growth more efficiently and cost-effectively.

"StorageTek believes that businesses must have the right information on the right device at the right price and time in order to successfully and cost-effectively manage their business," said Gary Francis, StorageTek corporate vice president and general manager, Automated Tape Solutions. "The new performance and functionality enhancements built into VSM 4 help customers make the most of their current investments and allow them to maximize their existing infrastructure. At the same time, VSM 4 offers a wide range of flexible disaster recovery/business continuity features -- and DR/BC is certainly one of the biggest IT concerns faced by businesses today."

According to a report issued in April 2003 by Gartner Dataquest, titled "Enterprise Virtual Tape Subsystem Magic Quadrant," StorageTek has been the leader in virtual tape subsystem unit shipments since 2001. "Virtual tape technology delivers on numerous value propositions to enable mainframe enterprises to achieve advanced storage performance and increased resource consolidation," said Nick Allen, vice president of Storage Research at Gartner.

"VSM 4 has helped us to utilize our tape storage resources more efficiently and effectively, and it has enabled us to protect our investments and optimize staffing for our storage initiatives," said Curt Borschel, manager of Enterprise Storage, Lufthansa Systems. "By allowing us to do more with our existing tape storage infrastructure and add virtual tape capacity on demand, VSM 4 will be an integral component of our data center for years to come."

StorageTek's VSM 4 uses advanced virtual tape technology to help customers fully optimize tape operations, resulting in immediate payback. VSM 4 supports multiple StorageTek automated tape technologies and was designed to extend the value of customers' investments in StorageTek products. It conserves existing tape storage infrastructure and media while significantly reducing the amount of floor space required for traditional tape storage systems.

VSM 4 offers quadrupled capacity and virtual drive capabilities and has dramatically improved performance and connectivity. VSM 4 also offers an easier-to-use web-based graphical user interface (GUI) and utilizes disk buffering technology to enable disk-speed data access and throughput for extremely rapid response times, high-speed transaction processing, overall time savings and customer satisfaction.