Aberdeen Report Finds Solid Data Turbocharges Storage Performance; Impact Report Details Importance of Solid State Storage in Eliminating I/O Bottlenecks.

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 9, 1998--Solid Data Systems, a leading manufacturer of intelligent solid state storage systems, today announced that the Aberdeen Group, Inc., a leading industry analyst firm based in Boston, Mass., has profiled Solid Data in an Impact Report entitled, "Solid Data Systems: Turbocharging Disk Storage System Performance." The report, available today at www.aberdeen.com/research/abstract/12981246.htm and www.soliddata.com/technology/aberdeen.html, describes how Solid Data's Excellerator(tm) family of solid state storage solutions can reduce or eliminate I/O bottlenecks that slow down today's mission-critical applications.

According to Aberdeen, solid state storage is an ideal complement to demanding enterprise applications. The report states that solid state storage "works on the principle that no more than 10 percent of an application's data, such as transaction logs, temporary files, and index files may make up more than half of the I/O activity." These "hot files" are placed on Solid Data's Excellerator and stored in non-volatile DRAM, which provides dramatically faster access than the mechanical access of magnetic disk drives.

"Aberdeen's report comes at an interesting time for the solid state storage industry," said Criss Marshall, Solid Data Systems' vice president of marketing. "With DRAM prices dropping so dramatically over the past three years, solid state storage has become financially feasible for a wide range of Unix and NT application environments. Also, with more and more companies relying on data-intensive applications such as relational databases (RDBMS), online transaction processing (OLTP), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and document imaging, solid state storage is becoming a smarter, more affordable alternative to adding servers."

Solid Data's Excellerator Family Protects IT Investment

Aberdeen concludes by stating, "(The cost of) an Excellerator SSD system represents only a fraction of what other technical alternatives to fix I/O bottleneck problems can cost -- and much less than suffering a loss of labor productivity, a revenue loss, or even having to walk away from a large sunk-cost IT investment. For an IS organization, an Excellerator SSD system may be one way to pull another performance rabbit out of its hat, to the delight of cost-conscious management."

About Solid Data's Excellerator Family

Solid Data's Excellerator family is available in both Fast/Wide SCSI and Ultra SCSI interfaces. The self-contained storage systems connect easily with existing systems and provide redundant power supplies, backup drives, and memory parity protection to ensure high-availability. As a complement to the systems, Solid Data has developed proprietary I/O Dynamics software which helps identify hot files and helps network administrators determine the size of the system needed to solve their I/O problems.

About Solid Data Systems

Founded in 1993, Solid Data Systems (formerly DES) is a leading manufacturer of intelligent solid state storage systems. The Company's products deliver dramatic, mainframe-level performance improvements to I/O intensive applications such as relational databases (RDBMS), decision support systems, online transaction processing (OLTP), Internet services, and digital media. The Company's Excellerator family of products provides ultra high-speed access to data files, plug-and-play installation, and extremely high reliability. The Excellerator family runs on all major Unix and NT hardware platforms including Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HWP), Silicon Graphics (NYSE:SGI), Sun (Nasdaq:SUNW), IBM (NYSE:IBM), and Compaq (NYSE:CPQ). The company's headquarters are located at 2945 Oakmead Village Court, Santa Clara, California 95051 and can be reached by phone at 408/727-5497, by fax at 408/727-5496, and on the Internet at http://www.soliddata.com.