StorageTek announces Iceberg shipment milestone; Iceberg No. 500 Ships To AG Communication Systems

Business Wire, March 22, 1995

LOUISVILLE, Colo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 22, 1995--Storage Technology Corp. (NYSE:STK) today announced an important milestone for its Iceberg 9200 Virtual Storage Facility: AG Communication Systems, Phoenix, receives Iceberg shipment number 500.

Ron Henry, AG Communication Systems chief information officer, said that the company had ordered four Iceberg subsystems with a total capacity of 500 gigabytes.

"We currently have a mix of formats and densities including cached and uncached 3380- and 3390-class DASD," said Henry. "Because we can transfer any DASD format we have onto Iceberg, then change the configuration on the fly, we expect to reduce the complexity of our data management activities. This will be a tremendous time savings for us.

"Eventually," said Henry, "all our mainframe applications will run on Iceberg. This will be especially important for our critical applications, including the core software for our switching products, some remaining mainframe legacy systems and our quality control databases."

AG Communication Systems is a joint venture of AT&T and GTE. Its primary mission is to develop, manufacture and maintain telephone switching systems.

"We have been anticipating this event," said Ryal R. Poppa, StorageTek chairman, president and chief executive officer, "as the validation of what we have known all along. Now the word is out and Iceberg is gaining the market acceptance it deserves.

"We welcome AG Communication Systems and other customers who have come back to us because of Iceberg," continued Poppa. "Although we are experiencing strong acceptance from customers who know us because of their experience with our robotic cartridge libraries, we are especially pleased about our new customers. Iceberg gives our customers an edge when meeting the demands of their customers for availability and timely responsiveness. Iceberg extends the ability to compete," said Poppa.

"The DASD market is becoming ever more competitive in pricing and features; however, we expect Iceberg to continue its momentum this year," said Poppa. "While the extent of our success will depend in part on our competitors' reactions, we believe Iceberg has the cost and performance profile to be a significant part of the DASD market.

"As of mid-March, we have shipped a total of more than 90 terabytes of disk capacity, which is on pace with our expectations," said Poppa. "Worldwide, Iceberg is installed in over 300 sites and of these, about 25 percent have more than one Iceberg subsystem."

Iceberg is a revolutionary disk-array subsystem that is categorized as a managed array of independent disks, a unique architecture developed by StorageTek to slash the cost of owning and managing a mainframe disk-storage subsystem while providing nearly continuous availability of data. This is accomplished by combining the beneficial characteristics of RAID (redundant array of independent disks), CAID (cached array of independent disks) and virtual DASD.

Storage Technology Corp. designs, manufactures, markets and services, worldwide, information storage and retrieval subsystems for enterprisewide computer systems and networks. The company reported revenue of $1.62 billion in its fiscal year ended Dec. 30, 1994. Information on StorageTek is available at http://www.csn.net/StorageTek/ on the World Wide Web.

CONTACT: Storage Technology Corp., Louisville, Colo.

Judith Hargrave, 303/673-5559

e-mail: judith_hargrave@stortek.com