Plasmon ships more than two petabytes of UDO in first 10 months.

Plasmon (LSE: PLM), the market leader for professional data archival solutions, has announced that the company has shipped more than two petabytes of UDO (Ultra Density Optical) archival storage library capacity. Two petabytes is equal to 200 times the print collection of the U.S. Library of Congress. Shipments of Plasmon G-series libraries powered by UDO reached the milestone less than 10 months after the new technology was launched.

Plasmon offers UDO libraries, drives and media through distribution channel partners, system integrators and other OEMs. The two petabyte milestone figure excludes shipments by Hewlett Packard, one of Plasmon's key OEM partners, which also offers a family of UDO optical libraries as part of its Storageworks product line.

"The rate of new data creation has never been higher. In addition, the combination of rich historic-data applications like CRM, and the ease of new data-set creation from data warehouses means that reference data is likely the fastest growing information category for most organizations," said Robert Gray, Research Analyst at IDC, Framingham, MA. "Increasing compliance requirements and the opportunity to generate business value from this information is underpinning new technology investments to store, access and manage this. UDO technology is well positioned to support this growing need."

UDO libraries have already been installed at over 500 customer sites around the world across a wide range of industries including health care, financial services, government, retail services and manufacturing. UDO customers include:

--prominent investment banks in New York, London and Frankfurt,

--large, well-established on-line trading companies,

--multinational insurance companies and national pension funds,

--federal and state government institutions in the U.S. and in Europe,

--international and national health care delivery organizations,

--state television and radio broadcasters in Italy and Germany,

--retail and entertainment companies.

"Vienna International Airport evaluated a number of storage solutions for archiving all airport management information including maps, construction drawings, building systems and legal documents. We chose UDO as it provides reliable and secure long-term storage, while allowing documents to be retrieved very quickly," said Christian Vesely, Executive Vice President Information & Communication Systems, Vienna International Airport. "It offers significant cost benefits, and by making documents available through UDO, we will also save considerable office space when most departments move to our new Office Park by October 2004."

Other recent milestones for UDO include application support by more than 35 software vendors including offerings from IBM Tivoli, EMC Legato and Veritas. UDO is also the only blue laser optical technology to receive international standard certification from both Ecma and ISO.

"We have been working hard to keep up with the rapid ramp-up of UDO sales," said Christopher Harris, President of Plasmon. "UDO's data authenticity and media longevity have clearly been well received by the market. Its sales success demonstrates strong demand for cost-effective, professional archival storage that helps organizations address regulatory requirements, protect against litigation and drive maximum value from information assets."

UDO, which features blue lasers for recording rather than the red lasers used in previous optical drives such as MO and DVD, achieves far greater data densities, resulting in dramatically higher media capacities. UDO will be introduced at 60GB and 120GB media capacities over the next four years. Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is about one-fifth the cost of previous generation MO, much lower than competitive hard drive-based solutions and very attractive when compared to tape offerings.

The Phase Change recording technology used by UDO is field-proven and highly stable. With true Write Once authenticity and a media life of 50+ years, UDO meets the most demanding requirements of regulatory agencies and other authorities for the secure, long-term storage of information.

Plasmon is a leader in professional archival solutions, providing the industry's most comprehensive line of optical and tape libraries, drives and media and NAS/SAN storage networking solutions. Customers include corporations, institutions and government agencies worldwide and are backed by a global service and support network. Founded in 1985, Plasmon is listed on the London Stock Exchange (LSE: PLM), and had fiscal year 2004 sales revenues of $90 million. Worldwide headquarters are in Cambridge, United Kingdom with U.S. Sales and Manufacturing based in Colorado. Plasmon has regional sales offices throughout Europe and North America.