Artecon First to Support 36GB Drives in Storage Area Network Systems.

SAN DIEGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 6, 1999--

36GB Drives Decrease Total Cost of Ownership for LynxArray 500

SAN, while Improving Scalability, Performance, Manageability and

Reliability

Artecon (Nasdaq:ARTE), a global leader in high-availability open systems SAN-, server- and network-attached storage (NAS) solutions, today became the industry's first vendor to announce support of 36-gigabyte (GB) capacity disk drives in fully integrated Storage Area Network (SAN) systems. The new disk drives, manufactured by IBM (NYSE:IBM), reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) for SAN systems while increasing performance, reliability, manageability and system capacity.

"Lower drive capacities cause more strain on IT budgets because additional drives increase the need for more racks, enclosures and systems management overhead," said Omar Barraza, Artecon product marketing manager. "Our new 36GB drives enable customers to reduce TCO by providing more storage in less space by using fewer drives. Since drives are mechanical devices, fewer drives also minimize service needs while increasing overall system reliability because the probability of a drive failure is decreased. With these high-capacity drives, we can now scale to three terabytes (TB) in a single 72-inch rack, doubling our storage density to over 100GB per cubic foot."

Artecon's LynxArray(TM) 500 family of Storage Area Network systems are the first Artecon products to support the new 36GB drives. Artecon's LynxArray 500 line, which was first announced in December 1998, offers Windows NT and Sun Solaris customers a fully integrated, plug-and-play system that can easily scale to 20TB in a single SAN.

LynxArray 500 is ideally suited for data center applications such as data warehousing, online transaction processing, Internet and intranet servers, geographic information systems and multimedia communications. With the addition of the new 36GB drive capacities, LynxArray 500 further addresses customer requirements for consolidated, centrally managed enterprise storage resources. The LynxArray 500 incorporates numerous high-availability features and, with its dual independent Fibre Channel loops, offers data transfer bandwidth of up to 200MB per second per system.

SANs enable multiple servers to share a consolidated pool of storage, lowering the total cost of ownership. SAN systems are managed from a central point, and storage capacities allotted to each server can be dynamically adjusted to optimize efficient use of storage. SANs also allow tremendous flexibility to data center operations because LUNs, storage systems and servers can be added while the SAN remains online, thus maximizing uptime.

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     36GB Drives Improve Performance of LynxArray 500 SAN Systems

     The new 36GB drives, which feature rotational speeds of 7,200
RPM, offer data transfer rates comparable to 10,000-RPM drives and
much higher than traditional 4, 9 and 18GB 7,200-RPM drives. This
performance improvement is enabled by three factors:

     -    First, the drives incorporate IBM's latest media head
          positioning and drive channel technologies -- newer
          technologies than are available for the 10,000-RPM drives
          that IBM is currently shipping.

     -    Second, higher areal density of the drives, which means that
          more data is packed into a smaller space, increases data
          transfer rates.

     -    Third, the drives ship standard with 4MB cache buffers,
          versus the 1MB cache buffers of typical disk drives in this
          class.  Larger caches greatly increase drive performance by
          minimizing the effects of mechanical latency within disk
          drives.

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Availability and Pricing

Artecon's LynxArray 500 SAN systems with the new 36GB drives are shipping in January. Artecon will incorporate the 36GB drives into other Artecon products, such as its LynxNSS network-attached storage system and the LynxArray server-attached storage system, early this quarter. List price for a fully integrated 252GB LynxArray 500 dual-loop SAN including the rackmount enclosure, RAID controllers, hubs, power and cooling systems, Fibre Channel cabling and HBAs starts at under $90,000. Pricing includes pre-sales consultation and post-sales on-site configuration and installation.

About Artecon

Founded in 1984, Artecon designs, manufactures, markets and supports a broad range of enterprise storage solutions to satisfy the high availability, performance and capacity requirements of the open systems market. On March 31, 1998, Artecon completed a merger with independent RAID storage vendor Storage Dimensions, creating one of the world's largest open systems, independent storage companies serving the PC-LAN and Unix markets.

The combined company's products consist of server-attached as well as network-attached storage systems. In addition, the company's EXTREME product line includes disaster-tolerant RAID systems for telco Central Office and Internet applications. Artecon has a Japan-based subsidiary and a Europe-based subsidiary with offices in France, England and the Netherlands.

The company also operates through reseller and distributor channels worldwide. Additional information on Artecon can be found on the Internet at http://www.artecon.com.