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FlashDisk® OpenRAID Offers New IBM 36 Gbyte Disks and 80 Mbyte SCSI

Doubles Storage Density and Speed for Open Servers

WOBURN, MA (January 19, 1999) Winchester Systems Inc., a leading developer of high-end storage for open servers, today announced immediate availability of FlashDisk OpenRAID storage with IBM 36-Gbyte Ultrastar hard drives. Winchester Systems and IBM Storage Systems Division have teamed to deliver a new level of high capacity storage with extraordinary performance.

IBM developed the new, high-speed 36-Gbyte Ultrastar to easily integrate into existing 18-Gbyte hard drive applications. Utilizing this technology, Winchester Systems developed a massively parallel RAID architecture with end-to-end, 80-Mbytes per second SCSI from host to drives. This doubles the capacity and I/O performance of previous high-speed FlashDisk models, and enables Winchester Systems to guarantee that FlashDisk is the “world's fastest SCSI RAID storage system.”

According to Mike Roberts, vice-president of sales at Winchester Systems, “Working with IBM offers us real time-to-market advantages. While other high-capacity RAID vendors still use slower 5.25-inch disks, Winchester Systems offers the new 3.5"-inch IBM 36-Gbyte disks with mainframe-class performance at lower cost per megabyte and with much higher reliability.” This makes the new FlashDisk OpenRAID storage well suited for a wide range of business and mission critical applications.

“Dependability and performance are the key reasons customers choose FlashDisk storage for their servers, and that's why we selected IBM Ultrastar hard drives," states Jerry Namery, vice-president of engineering at Winchester Systems. "Working with IBM engineers, we reduced drive rotational vibration and thermal buildup to improve FlashDisk reliability and speed. We are proud to offer the powerful solution of the new FlashDisk with IBM 36-Gbyte Ultrastar drives.”

FlashDisk OpenRAID delivers 80 Mbytes per second speed today with Ultra2 SCSI adapters on Windows NT, Netware, Linux, SCO, Banyan Vines, MacOS, DEC UNIX and OpenVMS. Servers that run HP/UX, Sun Solaris, IBM AIX and OS/2 Warp, SGI IRIX and BSD UNIX currently support FlashDisk at 40 Mbytes per second Ultra SCSI speed, but 80 Mbytes per second support is expected soon.

FlashDisk OpenRAID - A Unique Plug-and-Play Storage Solution

FlashDisk OpenRAID is a true hardware, plug-and-play storage solution, which emulates standard Ultra2 SCSI disks to the host--eliminating proprietary host software, RAID managers or Y2K worries. It supports hardware RAID 1, 3, 5 and 1+0 for data protection. All models include call-for-help hardware paging, and up to 128 arrays can be managed from one user console by Ethernet with Telnet, SNMP, and network management software such as HP OpenView or IBM NetView.

Three FlashDisk models are available for immediate delivery: FlashDisk OpenRAID Desktop contains 145 Gbytes of usable storage in a remarkably small one-foot cube. It supports one or two host servers on dedicated 80-Mbyte per second SCSI ports. FlashDisk Pedestal holds 254 Gbytes of usable storage in a small desk side enclosure, which easily converts to a low-profile rackmount shelf only seven inches high. This model supports up to four simultaneous host servers on dedicated 80-Mbyte per second SCSI ports. Both FlashDisk Desktop and Pedestal models deliver 9,779 I/Os per second and 65 Mbytes per second sustained throughput.

FlashDisk OpenRAID Enterprise cabinet holds up to 2.3 Tbytes of usable storage and supports up to 36 simultaneous host servers. It contains up to 72 IBM UltraStar 36- Gbyte drives with 1.2 Gbytes of massively parallel cache, and sustains data transfers of 585 Mbytes per second and over 54,000 I/Os per second.

About Winchester Systems Inc.

Founded in 1981, Winchester Systems Inc. is dedicated to providing technically superior disk and tape solutions to a diverse clientele worldwide, including many Fortune 500 companies and federal agencies. Since 1989, customers such as Honeywell, MCI, Motorola, Boeing, Tropicana, Siemens, Ceridian, Deloitte & Touche and the U.S. Coast Guard have deployed Winchester Systems' FlashDisk solutions with great success. Many customers report that FlashDisk accelerates their disk-intensive applications by 100 percent to 500 percent. FlashDisk massively parallel cached RAID solutions deliver fast, simple, reliable and cost-effective access to server data.

Winchester Systems pioneered the concept of “plug-and-play” OpenRAID storage by adhering to strict industry SCSI standards without relying on proprietary host software, drivers, or storage managers. Winchester Systems' FlashDisk competes with RAID storage systems from EMC (NYSE: EMC), Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HP), and Sun (NASDAQ: SUNW). More information is available at http://www.winsys.com, or by calling 800-325-3700.

Winchester Systems, FlashDisk and OpenRAID are trademarks or registered trademarks of Winchester Systems All other brands or products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders and should be treated as such.

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