HP ANNOUNCES NEW 300GB MAGNETO-OPTICAL JUKEBOX

HP's Largest Capacity Jukebox Targets High-end Document and Image
Management, Data Warehousing and Archiving Applications

Palo Alto, California. August 7, 1995

Hewlett-Packard Company today announced its highest-capacity
magneto-optical jukebox, the HP SureStore Optical 300st.

The new jukebox targets high-end storage applications and is capable of
managing 300GB of data, using six optical drives and 238 optical disks.

The jukebox will be available initially with industry-standard 1.3GB,
5.25-inch magneto-optical drives. As next-generation 2.6GB magneto-optical
drives become available, HP will offer a complete conversion kit that will
allow customers to upgrade current 1.3GB jukebox drives to the
higher-capacity drives to provide more than 600GB of storage in a single
unit.

"HP is filling the gap in the market for the 300GB to terabyte capacity
range formerly dominated by the 12-inch form-factor vendors," said Dave
Morse, marketing manager for HP's Storage Systems Division. "We're seeing
the 12-inch market share beginning to yield to 5.25-inch, as network
administrators discover that 5.25-inch is inherently more reliable, less
costly and requires less maintenance than 12-inch."

According to Dataquest, HP currently leads the 5.25-inch magneto-optical
drive and jukebox markets. HP offers a complete family of products, which
range from a 1.3GB optical drive to the new 300GB optical jukebox.

Target Applications

Document and image management is one of the applications for which the
300st was designed. Paper documents, operating manuals, graphic images,
digitized data, photographs and other information can be transferred to
optical disks and stored online for fast access, easy data exchange and
improved tracking.

Banks use this application of optical technology to improve customer
service by keeping customer-account information online; design and
manufacturing companies increase engineering productivity by keeping
CAD/CAM drawings online for immediate access within engineering
workgroups; and government installations meet the constraints of
downsizing and budget cuts by distributing and managing documentation
electronically.

Data warehousing is another application that can use the 300st. A data
warehouse is a decision-support database maintained separately from an
organization's operational databases. Data warehousing with optical
storage allows users to access information contained in any data source
within their enterprise. At the same time, a data warehouse can help a
corporate IT department reduce its backlog of custom reports and
data-extract work.

Financial services, such as banks and trading institutions, use data
warehousing to gain better control over their business through analysis of
their operations. Data warehousing helps telecommunications companies
market their services by gaining a better understanding of customer
behavior.

The retail industry can use data warehousing to improve inventory tracking
and to analyze buying trends. This information allows the retail industry
to provide better customer service while keeping costs down.

New Product Features

With the SureStore 300st, HP is the first jukebox vendor to bring on-line
drive-replacement capabilities to the market. Similar to the "hot swap"
concept popularized in the disk-array market, on-line drive replacement
for optical jukeboxes means that the failed drive can be replaced while
other drives remain online. Users, therefore, can continue to access data.
This feature becomes more valuable in the overall storage scheme as more
mission-critical data is stored near-line on lower-cost optical media.

The new jukebox allows users to take advantage of the LUN (logical unit
number) capability in SCSI by incorporating a LUN converter. The LUN
converter provides for more system expandibility without taking additional
SCSI-addresses.This allows more optical jukeboxes to be connected on a
single SCSI bus.

In addition, the new jukebox uses HP's two-disk transport system,
introduced earlier this year with HP's mid-range capacity SureStore
Optical 80st jukebox family. As with the midrange product, the two-disk
transport robotics reduce disk-exchange time in the SureStore 300st by 40
percent. Disk exchange is the time it takes to stop reading data on a
disk, exchange disks and begin reading data on another disk.

The SureStore 300st is supported on major operating systems through HP's
Referenced Solutions Program, including UNIX system-based platforms,
Novell, MS-DOS and Windows NT. Specific software solution offerings are
available from Plexus, Optika and Wang.

U.S. Prices and Availability

The SureStore Optical 300st jukebox from HP is expected to be available on
Sept. 1.

          Order Number        C1107A/B
          Drives              six
          Max. No. of Disks   238
          Capacity            309.4GB
          Price               $65,000

HP entered the information-storage business 24 years ago when it began
manufacturing and selling hard-disk drives. Today, the HP Information
Storage Group has grown to more than $1.5 billion in revenue (FY 1994)
with a complete line of information-storage products for computers and
computer networks. HP solutions include disk drives and disk arrays,
magneto-optical drives and jukeboxes, and digital-audio-tape drives and
libraries. ISG products are sold through a variety of distribution
channels under the HP SureStore and HP Colorado brand names as well as to
OEM customers.
 
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