First To Ship Industry-Leading LTO Ultrium-Generation 3 Tape Drives

Certance LLC, a world leader in innovative, cost-effective data protection solutions for companies of all sizes, announced today immediate general availability of CL 800 solutions, its third-generation LTO Ultrium-format product offering. Availability of CL 800 broadens Certances LTO Ultrium product offering, delivering the capacity, performance and reliability required by large businesses and the Enterprise. LTO Ultrium tape drive shipments held a greater than 2:1 ship-share lead over the SDLT format in 2003 according to a Gartner Dataquest report: Tape Drive Market Shares, 2003 (March 24, 2004).

Certance is pleased to introduce the first LTO Ultrium 3 product choices to large and enterprise users requiring the next generation of LTO Ultrium technology to meet the demands of rapidly-growing data storage requirements. stated Ryan Malone, senior product marketing manager for LTO Ultrium solutions at Certance. Our introduction of CL 800 solutions represents a major milestone for the company and an opportunity to provide solutions to our customers that are rich with Certance exclusive reliability features and LTO technology products that provide users with open format advantages and lowest total cost of ownership value.

CL 800 - Capacity and Performance for Large Businesses and the Enterprise
Doubling the capacity of LTO Ultrium 2 tape drives, the Certance CL 800 provides up to 800 Gbytes of data protection per cartridge with backup speeds of up to 490 Gbytes per hour. Targeted at large businesses and the Enterprise with pricing starting at $5,899, the CL 800 provides a clear alternative to proprietary formats such as SDLT 600 by delivering a 33% capacity and 88% performance advantage. Providing an opportunity for customers to leverage their previous media investments, CL 800 writes to both LTO-3 and LTO-2 media and reads from LTO-3, LTO-2 and LTO-1 media formats. Available in 5.25-inch full-height internal, desktop and 2U rackmount configurations, the CL 800 comes with a fully-licensed version of BakBone NetVault backup software. Certance plans to support Write Once, Read Many (WORM) functionality in its CL 800 solutions for affordable, unalterable data storage related to current regulatory compliance requirements.

Certance-Exclusive Features Provide Highest Reliability
Certance CL 800 combines the proven performance and reliability of Linear Tape-Open (LTO) technology with Certance-exclusive reliability features to provide the most reliable midrange tape drive available today.

• MediaShield extends the media life to over 500 full backups.
• 13-Speed Transfer ensures tape streaming and eliminates shoe-shining by automatically matching the hosts transfer speed to one of thirteen speeds.
• Dynamic Powerdown protects the drive and data cartridge in the event of a power loss.
• SmartVerify concurrently verifies all data written to the tape, virtually eliminating the need for traditional verify pass during backup operations, thus reducing the required backup window.