StorageTek Ships 500th Streamline SL500 Modular Library System

LOUISVILLE, Colo., Feb. 14 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Customers know a good thing when they see it. That's why businesses are lining up to take advantage of the next generation of tape storage automation technology -- the new StorageTek StreamLine(TM) SL500 modular library system.

Today StorageTek(R) (Storage Technology Corporation) , the leading provider of enterprise information lifecycle management, announced that it has surpassed the 500th SL500 customer milestone. Customers including the Aquarium of Genoa, Carlson Companies, Kia Motors America and Palmetto Health are using the system to archive and protect their business critical information.

These hundreds of customers are realizing the benefits of StorageTek's advanced modular library system, which was made generally available in October 2004, and are changing the way companies manage their business critical data. The SL500 leverages technology from StorageTek's enterprise-class, flagship StreamLine SL8500 library to offer the mid-range market unmatched scalability, storage density and data center class reliability. The modular library system provides the most scalable, rack mounted, tape automation solution in the market today and is designed to handle growing data protection needs by providing tremendous flexibility, raising the bar in configurability.

"The SL500 is the perfect solution to meet our evolving data storage needs, which get more complex as we manage and backup the content on the Web sites for our recreational facilities," said Filippo Costa, IT Manager of Costa Edutainment SpA, which manages public and private facilities dedicated to recreational, cultural and educational activities, as well as scientific research and study. "Its performance, scalability, reliability, and manageability will enable us to manage and protect our data for years to come. We chose this solution for the Aquarium of Genoa because StorageTek was able to provide us with a cost-effective, flexible library that balances our current data storage needs with future requirements."

Recently named Datamation Magazine's Product of the Year in the Enterprise Server category, the SL500 was designed to meet customer needs to make backup and recovery systems reliable, simple, and less labor intensive. In support of this objective, the SL500 has completed interoperability testing and certification for backup software from all of the major independent software vendors across a variety of Windows, UNIX, Novell and Linux operating systems.

"The SL500 is receiving such great response from the market because it addresses the increasingly complex backup and recovery needs of the mid-range customer," said Pat Martin, StorageTek chairman, president and CEO. "Organizations continue to look for cost effective, reliable and less labor intensive ways to protect data and the SL500 answers this call. The StorageTek StreamLine family of enterprise solutions has exceeded customers' expectations on the potential of enterprise data storage, as it enables them to simplify and automate their backup and recovery operations and establish a highly flexible archive architecture to accommodate future growth."

"StorageTek has brought the advanced technology developed for the enterprise SL8500 tape library to the mid-range market with the SL500," says Dianne McAdam, Senior analyst and partner, Data Mobility Group. "Its compact design and scalability make it a good solution for mid-range customers with high data growth requirements. The shipment of the 500th library is a significant milestone for StorageTek."

Building on the strong reputation of the StreamLine family of products, the SL500 provides interfaces to consolidate UNIX and Windows computing infrastructures. The SL500 also allows for modular upgrades of capacity and throughput. Customers upgrading their library systems have traditionally experienced disruptions because they have had to move to a completely different library. The SL500 can be seamlessly scaled for capacity, functionality, and availability within the same library system. This approach completely changes the basis of customer value creation in mid-market tape automation.

The SL500 provides a space efficient library solution that establishes a new benchmark on cost effective tape automation. The SL500 uses a dense cartridge slot design that achieves the optimal use of a customer's available floor space and provides users the best of both worlds: large storage capacity (up to 220 Terabytes) and mechanical reliability of a monolithic library and the small, convenient form factor and modularity of a rack mount library.

About StorageTek

StorageTek is a $2 billion global company that enables businesses, through its information lifecycle management strategy, to align the cost of storage with the value of information. The company's innovative storage solutions manage the complexity and growth of information, lower costs, improve efficiency and protect investments. For more information, see http://www.storagetek.com/, or call 1.800.877.9220 or 303.673.5151.

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