Data General Plans to Significantly Increase Sales and Marketing Investments In CLARiiON Storage Business.

WESTBORO, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 17, 1999--

Data General Corporation (NYSE:DGN) today announced that it plans to significantly increase its sales and marketing investments in its CLARiiON storage business to ensure long-term growth. Over the next 18 months, Data General plans to hire in excess of 450 people in its CLARiiON organization, the majority of which will be direct sales people. The additional expense of these people, and related marketing efforts, is expected to be more than $100 million over the 18-month period.

"The market for Fibre Channel-based disk storage is projected to grow at 65 percent annually for the next few years," said Data General President and CEO Ronald L. Skators. CLARiiON revenues for Data General's fiscaln sold with servers as part of a complete systeendors: IBM, Compaq, Sun and Hewlett Packard. Storage on these vendors' servers accounts for more than half of the storage market. By significantly accelerating the expansion of our end-user sales force, and by establishing a stronger brand name for our CLARiiON products, we have the opportunity to reach this large market."

Mr. Skates stated, "while short-term results will suffer because of the heavy investments we are now making, the long-term market opportunities dictate these actions. We have the products to be a major player in the independent storage business and these investments are necessary to take advantage of the market. We anticipate it will take a year to generate the revenues necessary to produce a return on these investments, but we expect they will provide the base for rapid future growth in this burgeoning market."

Mr. Skates commented, "the advent of Storage Area Networks, or SANs, is changing the computing model and helping to establish storage as a market apart from servers. SANs, which are based on Fibre Channel technology, address key issues for data access and backup and move the center of computing from the server to the storage system. CLARiiON is the only full, end-to-end Fibre Channel technology available. Since CLARiiON is `SAN-ready' and designed to operate with virtually any brand of server, we believe that Data General can quickly become the leading independent supplier of storage systems in the SAN market."

According to IDC, the market for Storage Area Networks based on fiber channel is projected to double annually for several years and reach more than $9 billion by 2002.

Data General's CLARiiON division has shipped more than 100,000 disk arrays and over 7 petabytes of open RAID-protected sllers, and system integrators worldwide. Data General's CLARiiON FC5000 Fibre Channel disk array family is be to complement our existing channel strategy with an accelerated end-user sales and marketing approach to grt sales force from its current level of 50 to ohe company's Data General NOW e-commerce site to pursue CLARiiON sales.

-- Increasing marketing and advertising to position CLARiiON as THE Storage Alternative.

-- Accelerating the CLARiiON SAN development program to expand thlished customer base that is leveraging the benles and marketing investments begin to produce results. While these investments will have a negative effect ."

About Data General

Data General Co billion for fiscal 1998. Additional informationompany's or management's intentions, hopes, belidiffer materially from those in the forward-looking statements is contained from time to time in the company's SEC filings, including but not limited to the company's annual report on form 10- K for the year ended September 26, 1998 and our second fiscal quarter Form 10-Q for the period ended March 27, 1999. Copies of our 10-K and 10-Q may be obtained by contacting investor relations at 508 898-6550.

NOTE - Information on Data General, its products and services, can be accessed on the Internet at http://www.dg.com. Additional information on the CLARiiON Advanced Storage Division can be accessed at http://www.clariion.com.

AViiON and CLARiiON are registered trademarks of Data General Corporation