ADIC introduces major advance in disk-based backup.

Advanced Digital Information Corporation (Nasdaq:ADIC), a leader in Intelligent Storage solutions for the open systems market, today announced a major development in disk-based backup with the latest release of the company's Pathlight VX disk backup solution. Pathlight VX 2.0 is the industry's first disk backup solution to offer disk performance, enterprise scalability, and full disaster recovery support--all at half the cost of competitive products.

With its 2.0 release, Pathlight VX becomes the first open system backup product to combine the capacity and characteristics of disk and tape in a single, unified system, using advanced policy-based data management technology to provide total system capacities of nearly 3,000 terabytes. The combined system fits into existing backup environments, presenting itself to applications as a virtual tape library that transparently includes disk elements for high performance and RAID fault tolerance and tape elements for capacity, economy, and disaster recovery.

With Pathlight VX 2.0, IT managers can back up and restore critical data twice as fast as with conventional backup systems, support thousands of terabytes of data with a single system, and balance their data recovery service-level objectives against overall system costs. The policy-based management in Pathlight VX 2.0 offers the industry's first automated life cycle management for backup data, including the ability to create multiple copies on different media types to provide enhanced long-term data protection.

"Pathlight VX 2.0 really makes disk backup work for the enterprise," said Bill Britts, executive vice president of sales and marketing, ADIC. "IT departments can finally get disk performance and RAID reliability while securing long-term retention at dramatically reduced costs--and do it with an integrated solution that fits directly into their existing backup environments. We're providing the best of new technology while letting users retain their investment in the backup products and procedures that they use now."

"ADIC is advancing disk backup into an important new phase by combining the characteristics of disk and tape in an integrated system," says Dianne McAdam, Senior Analyst and Partner at Data Mobility Group. "Disk has great attributes for some parts of backup, but tape is a requirement too, not only for compliance with retention regulations, but simply for economical scale. In standard enterprise capacity ranges, the cost of tape storage will remain several times lower than disk for the foreseeable future. ADIC's approach toward combining the two technologies gives users the best characteristics of both."

"We are pleased to offer the IT community a genuine advance in data storage technology," explained Mr. Britts. "Pathlight 2.0 relies on key elements of ADIC's intellectual property which work together to provide a unique solution approach. These include our iPlatform library technology for enhanced reliability and faster service, StorNext data management software for policy based management, and our storage networking connectivity technology which creates high performance SAN appliances. This combination allows us to offer a solution that is unique in the marketplace."

Pathlight VX 2.0 provides throughput up to 2 TB/hour and a combined native capacity of nearly 3 petabytes. Disk storage elements range from 3.8 to 46.8 TB capacity; tape storage is provided by integrating ADIC Scalar and StorageTek L-Series libraries. Single-library configurations can reach 2823 TB native capacity--5599 TB with normal compression. For compliance with long-term data retention and disaster recovery requirements, Pathlight VX 2.0 responds to backup software commands by exporting application-readable media that can be restored in any standard tape drive or library.

The Pathlight VX 2.0 data management policies, in addition to providing transparent access to expanded capacity, also provide enhanced data protection by managing the life cycle of backup data. Policies in the 2.0 release include the ability to retain key data on disk for faster recovery of historical information, automated creation of up to four copies of data for redundant protection, and retention of local copies of data after a copy has been exported.

ADIC's Pathlight VX 2.0 will be available January 2005.