SONY OFFERS EASY MIGRATION TO AIT SOLUTIONS AS IT MARKS THE END OF ITS DDS FORMAT ROADMAP

SAN JOSE, Calif., -- April 18, 2001 -- Sony Electronics today announced that it will not develop a DDS-5 format, and will offer Advanced Intelligent Tape ^™ (AIT) solutions to meet the demands for higher capacity and performance.

DDS technology has been very successful in the market, with broad customer acceptance over a ten-year lifecycle to date. As an early pioneer in bringing DDS to the market, Sony has concluded that a new member of the DDS family, offering substantial improvements in both capacity and performance beyond DDS-4, is not practical given the realities of time-to-market and technology investment constraints. Sony is committed to delivering world-class solutions with its DDS-2, DDS-3 and DDS-4-based products.

As a roadmap alternative, Sony believes that AIT technology, with its proven market acceptance and future scalability, offers an ideal transition from DDS, with a comparable 3.5-inch drive form-factor, enhanced reliability and extensive automation support.

"When customers are ready to transition from DDS, the key decision factors that they should keep in mind include not only capacity and performance, but also form-factor, and future scalability," said John Woelbern, director of tape streamer OEM marketing for Sony Electronics' Core Technology Solutions Company. "AIT-1 fits this criteria by offering higher capacity and improved performance, as well as a small, 3.5-inch form-factor, all in a scalable product family with greater reliability and robustness at a competitive price."

The DDS product family has been very popular with our ProLiant server customers and we will continue to support their requirements in this segment with the opportunity to transition to the robust and scalable AIT family," said Rusty Smith, director of Nearline Storage for Compaq Computer Corporation's Enterprise Storage Group. "We are committed to AIT as our premier mid-range technology and will deliver a migration path to allow our customers to take advantage of AIT's innovations in delivering higher capacity and performance. We will also continue to integrate AIT devices into automation solutions and to make the technology available through our worldwide distribution channel."

With a capacity of up to 35GB and a data transfer rate of up to 4MB/sec., Sony's AIT-1 drive offers an ideal entry-point to AIT. The technology will offer up to 100GB per cartridge with AIT-3 starting in the third quarter of 2001, all the way to 800GB per cartridge before the end of the decade. AIT's wide acceptance in the library automation market provides further demonstrated scalability for customers requiring maximum storage capacity.

In order to support the transition from DDS to AIT, Sony-branded AIT drives are shipping with NovaStor Corporation's TapeCopy software, the only solution currently available for upgrading existing DDS back-up tapes to the AIT drive format. With TapeCopy software, DDS users can easily move their data to the premier AIT drive format without investing significant amounts of time or money.

"Sony is committed to offering a smooth and integrated upgrade path from DDS to AIT," said Brian Dickman, vice president of marketing for NovaStor. "Bundling a full version of TapeCopy with its Sony-branded AIT kits shows that Sony is dedicated to customer satisfaction."

In addition, Sony's trade-in program can be used to upgrade older functioning DDS drives for new Sony AIT drives and autoloaders.

Sony has been shipping its enhanced AIT-1 drives since January and currently offers both OEM and branded solutions starting at a list price of $1,249.