Sony Leverages Leadership in AIT Technology; ADIC, Compaq, Qualstar, Spectra Logic, Tape Laboratories and Growing AIT Forum Membership Create AIT Momentum.

ATLANTA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 15, 1999--

Sony Electronics Wednesday announced that growing customer support of its Advanced Intelligent Tape (AIT) line of data storage products is accelerating sales and market acceptance.

Since the introduction of AIT-2 in fourth quarter 1998, the product already represents more than 50 percent of AIT shipments.

Sony's AIT products, with their high-density recording technology, media and drive design, have created market, technology and customer momentum. AIT-2 is the first of a new generation of tape drives at the highest mid-range capacity point of 50GB native with 6MB/sec data transfer rate at a list price of under $4,000.

The announcement was made in Atlanta where Sony Electronics is an exhibitor at the NetWorld + Interop conference and exhibition (booth No. 7430).

"The accelerating AIT sales growth indicates what customers think of AIT's performance, reliability and capacity in this era of dramatically increasing data storage requirements," said John Woelbern, senior marketing manager of tape streamer products for Sony Electronics' Computer Components & Peripherals Division.

"Customers have recognized the superiority of the AIT tape technology, as well as the total solution advantages provided by our OEM customers."

OEM Customers Contribute to AIT Market Momentum

The growth in sales of AIT-based library solutions, Woelbern noted, has been a strong contributor to overall AIT momentum. Qualstar Corp. -- one of the leading suppliers of AIT-1 and AIT-2 tape library systems -- has seen a significant and continuous increase in AIT demand, with its library business more than doubling year to year.

Qualstar was one of the first companies to automate AIT for tape libraries and now offers AIT tape library solutions ranging from 300 gigabytes to 46 terabytes.

"Seventy-five percent of Qualstar's tape libraries now are AIT-2. It has been a swift yet graceful transition for customers using AIT-1. In addition, we are discovering more and newer applications for AIT, beyond backup, in the digital video archiving arena," noted Bob Covey, vice president of marketing for Qualstar.

Advanced Digital Information Corp. (ADIC) -- a leading global provider in the growing market to manage and protect information for computer networks -- recently introduced a broad line of scalable AIT-2 tape libraries, with products that range from two drives to more than 250 drives, and from two to 7,000 terabytes (compressed).

The new technology provides throughput of more than 40GB per hour per drive, capacity of up to 100GB per tape (compressed), and an average time to data of less than 30 seconds. AIT-2 technology is now available on the entire range of ADIC Scalar(R) and AML(R) tape libraries, doubling their capacity and throughput over previous generation AIT products.

ADIC and Sony are sponsoring a 1,000 terabyte library solution (compressed) for the Shoah Foundation, which is archiving more than 50,000 video interviews (400 terabytes of data) of Holocaust survivors.

Configured to hold dozens of tape drives and nearly 10,000 tape cartridges (with each one holding up to 100GB of compressed data), the ADIC AML series library, controlled by ADIC AMASS software, has enough capacity to store two copies of all of the interviews.

The task of accessing the interview files stored in the library falls to sophisticated AMASS storage management software, also provided by ADIC.

The Sony AIT-2 tape technology chosen for the Shoah Foundation archive provides high speed state-of-the-art digital storage. It stores up to 100GB of data (compressed) on a single 230-meter cartridge and transfers data at sustained speeds of up to 12MB/second (42GB per hour per drive compressed).

An innovative AIT feature is a memory chip embedded in the cartridge case which stores data location information and allows the drive to access any file on a given tape in an average time of only 27 seconds. This fast access to data makes the AIT technology especially well suited to active archives.

In addition, Spectra Logic has built a growing business by specializing in AIT automation. Spectra Logic was the first company to introduce AIT based tape libraries to the market in 1996 and now offers a wide range of AIT solutions from 375 GB to more than 80 terabytes.

"Spectra Logic has seen a tremendous increase in AIT interest from end-users, VARs, and the OEM community," said Nathan Thompson, chairman and CEO of Spectra Logic. "AIT-2 has dramatically increased the demand. The cost/performance advantages of AIT-2 are making it the technology leader for mid-range tape applications."

Spectra Logic was also first to introduce a fully integrated Fibre-Channel AIT library to the market in 1998 allowing Spectra Logic's tape libraries to operate in SAN environments without the need for an external Fibre Channel to SCSI Bridge.

Furthering Spectra Logic's commitment to AIT technology, the company plans to release a new family of tape libraries in the October timeframe based on a new architecture designed for larger centralized SAN environments.

Technology Leadership Spurs Customer Demand, New Applications

On the application front, Tape Laboratories, Inc -- an ISO 9001 company is the first company shipping an innovative partitioning solution for vertical market back-up and archiving applications based on AIT's Memory-in-Cassette architecture.

According to Alan Ignatin, chief technology officer for TapeLabs, by leveraging AIT MIC capabilities, their solutions can partition an AIT cartridge into up to 64 logical tapes.

Using a 360-tape library such as the TLS 412360 from Qualstar, and TapeLabs' 3490 emulation, a user can now have 23,000 square tapes online at a cost of $1.30 per stacked volume for huge cost benefits in media, storage and fast file access.

AIT Forum Grows, Members Add AIT to Product Lines

The AIT Forum -- the consortium of AIT solution providers -- has attracted four new members, including Chaparral Network Storage, Inc., Data General, SGI (Silicon Graphics, Inc.), and StraightLine, in its second quarter of operation.

The 13-member forum will be holding its third meeting this October and has already formed several working sub-committees to advance AIT technologies and solutions, and is planning to establish a technology Web site to give an independent industry perspective on AIT developments.

In the second quarter 1999, Compaq launched 35GB AIT-1. At 35GB native capacity and 3MB per second (10.8 GB per hour) native data transfer rate, the Compaq AIT-1 product provides a key price/performance advantage to customers and a step-up from low-cost DDS with nearly three times the capacity and performance.

This solution is ideal for backing-up Compaq Windows NT(R) servers and can protect valuable customer data in a more efficient and cost-effective manner.

Sony also is committed to making AIT tape technology into an industry standard. AIT-2 tape has been adopted as an industry standard by the European Computer Manufacturers' Association. (ECMA No. 246, ISO/IEC 15780), while formal adoption of the MIC standard is expected from ECMA. Sony also is actively pursuing standardization of the AIT-2 format.

At a product level, Sony plans to launch in the fourth quarter 1999 remote access MIC -- which will provide non-contact access allowing the retrieval of information in MIC without physically mounting media within the drive.

The remote access MIC will be a cost-effective replacement for the bar code scanner automation products, Sony's Woelbern explained. The feasibility of non-contact remote access MIC for robotics applications has been demonstrated, and component samples have been submitted to key AIT library automation suppliers for evaluation and product integration.

"Not only is Sony the first-to-market with next generation mid-range products," said Qualstar's Covey, "but Sony also will be the leader in data storage application of remote access Memory-in-Cassette (MIC) and provide an industry standard for others."

Sony Electronics Background: Based in San Jose, Calif., the Tape Streamer Products Division of Sony Electronics' Component Co. markets tape drives and autoloaders through OEM, industrial distribution, and reseller channels.

Note to editors: For additional information about Sony computer products, call 800/353-7669 or visit Sony's World Wide Web site at http://www.sony.com/storagebysony.