Data General's CLARiiON Storage Division Unveils Industry's First Full Fibre Channel Storage Area Network Solution.

WESTBORO, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 18, 1999--

Introduces High-Speed SANbackup Solution CLARiiON:

'THE Storage Alternative'

At a press conference today from its corporate headquarters, Data General Corporation's CLARiiON Storage Division unveiled its strategy to provide the industry's first family of full Fibre Channel-based Storage Area Network (SAN) solutions.

The first open SAN product, CLARiiON SANbackup, which is available immediately, allows an organization to move its mission-critical data from disk to tape without impacting its enterprise network. Data General is the first storage vendor to ship this level of complete, end-to-end Fibre Channel SAN solution, uniquely solving large-scale NT server backup problems.

In addition, the company outlined an aggressive roadmap that delivers open SAN solutions, including CLARiiON multi-host shared storage, over the course of this calendar year. These SAN solutions will allow organizations to share data stored on CLARiiON full Fibre Channel arrays in multi-server platform environments, including Windows NT and UNIX.

"As the only major storage vendor currently shipping full end-to-end Fibre Channel based storage systems, Data General is the leader in this technology which is the enabling architecture for the deployment of storage area networks," said Ron Skates, president and chief executive officer of Data General.

"Our goal is to become the premier supplier of storage area networking solutions," added Mr. Skates. "To accomplish that, we are embarking on an aggressive program that includes rapidly expanding our CLARiiON direct sales force, providing extensive professional services and continuing our ambitious CLARiiON SAN development schedule."

In addition, Data General has launched a major marketing effort to position CLARiiON as "THE Storage Alternative." The program highlights the strong positioning CLARiiON has against server vendors who are focused on protecting their installed bases; smaller niche "boutique" vendors who cannot offer the breadth of product and services provided by Data General; and the monolithic "big box" vendors who sell more expensive, inflexible storage solutions based on proprietary architectures.

"The CLARiiON SAN initiative launched today is the logical next-step in the evolution that we began two years ago when CLARiiON shipped the industry's first full Fibre Channel storage products," said Joel Schwartz, senior vice president and general manager of the CLARiiON Advanced Storage Division of Data General. "By anticipating this next wave of storage interconnect, we have put the strategic elements of our business model in place to catapult CLARiiON into an early lead in what is now the most compelling trend in the industry today - the Storage Area Network."

"The Open Systems SAN market will exceed $6 billion in 2001, as companies look for new and better ways to manage, protect, access, and share their stored data," said John McArthur, Program Director, Storage Systems Research, IDC. "Fibre Channel technology is a key building block in the SAN market, and Data General CLARiiON is a pioneer of full Fibre Channel storage solutions. Its early investments in full Fibre Channel storage are paying off, as its customers embrace SAN solutions."

CLARiiON SANbackup - The First in a Series

Developed as a high-speed, open storage network solution, CLARiiON SANbackup enables users to free up valuable client/server LAN resources from data backup and refocus these resources on business critical applications. CLARiiON SANbackup is the first and only LAN- free backup and recovery solution that takes full advantage of Internet Protocol (IP) over Fibre Channel, providing file level backup and recovery simultaneously to all servers in an enterprise.

CLARiiON SANbackup, which includes the Legato NetWorker data protection product suite, will provide customers with increased performance and will reduce the high cost of managing dispersed backup and recovery implementations by leveraging the Fibre Channel interface to achieve greater scalability and centralized management of data. With CLARiiON SANbackup, the addition of clients is simplified by the Fibre Channel connectivity and the management of the backup is centralized through SANbackup solutions. CLARiiON will continue to evolve the SANbackup solution providing investment protection and new server functionality, such as server-less backup. By not having the server in the data path, customers gain backup speeds exceeding one terabyte per hour.

"CLARiiON SANbackup offers both UNIX and NT environments significant scalability and performance advantages for back-up operations - clearly demonstrating the positive economic impact that open SANs bring to today's open networked enterprise environments," added Joanne Masingill, vice president of marketing for CLARiiON.

Louis C. Cole, president and CEO of Legato Systems, adds, "We're very pleased to be working with CLARiiON on developing innovative SAN data protection products. Data General's CLARiiON SANbackup solution, utilizing Legato NetWorker and future technologies, will provide our customers with advanced data movement and protection capabilities that take maximum advantage of new SAN infrastructures. It's alliances like ours that are enabling customers to realize the promise of SAN technology."

Christopher Yetman, Director of Customer Services Delivery at GTE Internetworking, said, "Over the next 6 to 8 months we will purchase over one terabyte of CLARiiON storage and backing that up can be a challenge. We are very much looking forward to having SANs help us solve that backup problem."

Leveraging core CLARiiON technology as well as proven products from key strategic partners, CLARiiON SANbackup delivers a solution for establishing a solid SAN infrastructure by bringing together key components, as a system. These components include:

-- Backup NT Server- size of this dedicated NT server is determined by the number of clients and amount of data to be backed up.

-- Tape Library - size is based on the total disk capacity being managed and the operation's back-up policy.

-- Back up Software - open back up software applications, provided by Legato Systems includes Legato Networker Power Edition v5.5 and database modules for Oracle, SQL and Microsoft Exchange;

-- Disk Storage for Back-up Application - includes dedicated storage for back-up application use;

-- Hub Connectors - used to configure CLARiiON SANbackup with its host clients.

About Data General CLARiiON

With its CLARiiON family, Data General Corporation (NYSE: DGN) is the first major vendor to ship end-to-end Fibre Channel disk arrays, the foundation for deployment of Storage Area Networks (SANs). Having shipped more than 100,000 CLARiiON disk arrays and over 7 petabytes (7,000 terabytes) of usable RAID-protected storage, Data General is recognized as the world's leading storage supplier to OEMs. High-availability solutions, provided through resellers and direct to end users, feature flexible, scalable products for Windows NT and UNIX platforms. They include full Fibre Channel and SCSI disk arrays and Navisphere(R) storage management software.

Data General, which is based in Westborough, Massachusetts, is a major supplier of storage and enterprise computing solutions for customers worldwide. In addition to CLARiiON Fibre Channel storage systems, the company's products include high-end NT and UNIX-based AViiON servers, and related software and services. The company reported fiscal 1998 revenues of $1.5 billion. Additional information on the company, its products, and services is available on the Internet at www.dg.com. More information on CLARiiON technology and products can be accessed on the Internet at www.clariion.com.

CLARiiON, AViiON and Navisphere are registered trademarks of Data General Corporation. All other brand and product names referenced in this press release are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders

CLARiiON backgrounder 

The CLARiiON SAN Roadmap

An early Data General commitment to full Fibre Channel RAID arrays was based on success in delivering high availability external RAID arrays into the open systems market and the opportunity to design a new family of modular arrays based on Fibre Channel technology. With Fibre Channel becoming the de facto industry standard for storage interconnects and the foundation for Storage Area Networking, Data General is very well positioned with a mature, volume tested, industry leading family of "SAN Ready" storage solutions - the CLARiiON FC5000 product family.

SANs - The Intersection of Revolution and Evolution

Storage management and storage applications are a natural first step in the SAN evolution. End users are longing for better ways to deploy and manage storage as a separate and strategic asset in there IT infrastructure, while backup continues to be a significant concern. The delivery of more efficient and reliable solutions for successfully accomplishing backup and restore operations is a major win for end users. CLARiiON SANbackup frees up LAN resources and consolidates backup, employing storage area networking as an efficient and reliable solution. The emerging infrastructure has an increasing value for end users as the IT enterprise grows, with the future delivery of new storage applications and SAN functionality that leverage initial investments in storage deployment, management and backup.

Shared storage - Virtual Arrays

The next significant SAN deliverable from Data General will be the ability to share CLARiiON arrays, or multiple arrays, among heterogeneous server environments - UNIX and NT. As CLARiiON arrays become more powerful and scalable, sharing storage and enabling data migration applications is another major win for end users. Today's CLARiiON full Fibre Channel, high availability, enterprise class arrays can easily scale to multiple terabytes in a single array. Sharing the values of this industry leading storage solution among diversified server/application loads delivers the best performance and application service at very competitive costs to the end user. Additionally, the ability to manage storage as a separate and independent asset provides new levels of flexibility in enterprise IT management.