Data General's CLARiiON Storage Division is First to Ship IBM 36-GB Fibre Channel Disk Drives in RAID Solution.

SOUTHBORO, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--August 3, 1999--

CLARiiON Full Fibre Channel Storage Gives Customers Unprecedented

Capacity in a Single Five Square Foot Rack

Data General Corporation's CLARiiON(R) Storage Division today announced it is the first to ship 36-gigabyte (GB) 7200-rpm (revolutions per minute) Fibre Channel disk drives from IBM in full Fibre Channel RAID solutions. With the new, higher capacity disk drives, Data General is providing over three and a half terabytes of capacity in a single rack of 100 drives that fills a mere five square foot floor space.

Additionally, a single CLARiiON array of up to 120 disk drives can now support over four terabytes of full Fibre Channel storage capacity. In doing so, Data General is significantly cutting the cost per megabyte of full Fibre Channel storage, allowing organizations to build cost-effective and scalable storage foundations that support mission-critical applications. The density and modularity of CLARiiON solutions and the new devices provide users with greatly improved space utilization, reducing the total cost of ownership and cost of deploying large storage pools within enterprise environments up to 33 percent.

"CLARiiON continues to be `first to market' in offering higher capacity drives with our scalable full Fibre Channel RAID storage solutions. CLARiiON customers receive the benefits of higher performance and higher capacity at the lowest possible cost per megabyte, gaining a more efficient and cost-effective computing environment," said Joanne Masingill, vice president of CLARiiON marketing for Data General. "The addition of these high density IBM disk drives gives us the ability to maintain a continued offering of unparalleled performance, scalability, data availability and flexibility in CLARiiON full Fibre Channel storage solutions."

In addition to the IBM 36-GB 7,200-rpm disk drives, 9 and 18-GB 10,000-rpm Fibre Channel disk drives from IBM are also available. Data General's offering of multiple drives enables CLARiiON full Fibre Channel storage solutions to meet the varying requirements of increasingly complex business computing environments. Whether the requirements are for performance in high I/O environments, such as online transaction processing (OLTP), or for greater capacity in synchronous environments, such as video applications, CLARiiON offers an effective full Fibre Channel storage solution.

"Offering high-quality state-of-the-art Fibre Channel drives is an important part of IBM's hard drive strategy," said Dr. M.S. Bhat, director of IBM's Server Hard Drive business. "We are very pleased to have Data General integrate our drives into its CLARiiON products."

Pricing and Availability

The 36-GB 7,200-rpm, as well as 18 and 9-GB 10,000-rpm, IBM Fibre Channel disk drives are immediately available for CLARiiON FC5600 and FC5700 storage solutions at a list price of $3,900, $2,850 and $1,850 respectively. The remainder of the family of full Fibre Channel storage solutions will be available with these IBM Fibre Channel drives next quarter. Data General has been shipping 18 and 9-GB, 10,000-rpm Fibre Channel drives from Seagate since February of this year. For more information please call 1-800-67-ARRAY or by visiting www.clariion.com.

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(R) 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 may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders