Integration-friendly NL35 Series offers cost-effective tiered storage for IT Professionals that require high-capacity, low-cost-per-GB solutions

Seagate Technology (NYSE:STX), the world's leading supplier of disc drives, today announced its latest addition to the NL35 Series family: the NL35 SATA. The NL35 family of enterprise-ready drives was developed in response to the growing need for cost-effective enterprise-class storage in nearline and secondary storage applications. Unveiled today at Storage Networking World in Florida, the NL35 SATA disc drive joins the previously unveiled NL35 FC Fibre Channel model that together effectively fill the price/performance gap between online and archive storage.

With both Fibre Channel and SATA interfaces, Seagate's integration-friendly NL35 family is uniquely positioned to serve in the nearline and secondary storage space for both Fibre Channel and Serial Attached SCSI (SAS)-based enterprise infrastructures. The NL35 FC disc drives are optimized for use within networked Fibre Channel enterprise systems, while the NL35 SATA drives are the ideal solution for seamless integration within direct-attached environments using SAS. Only Seagate has fully addressed the varied and unique demands of both of these spaces and has the industry's broadest product line of disc drives for the enterprise.

The NL35 SATA is a solid enterprise-ready drive that enables enterprises to meet their storage performance and capacity requirements by allowing the combination of SAS and SATA drives together within the same SAS infrastructure. Hundreds or thousands of NL35 SATA drives can be deployed and managed within a single SAS domain, enabling highly scalable, cost-effective storage solutions for capacity-intensive nearline applications. The applications for nearline storage include: disc to disc backup/storage recovery, virtual tape backup/storage recovery, fixed content-addressed storage for image and document management, and lower-tiered storage of regulatory compliance or other business data. Seagate's NL35 Series disc drive facilitates faster, more reliable backup/recovery for systems at lower overall cost versus traditional tape systems.

"The emergence of tiered storage environments was in direct response to the storage consolidation needs of data centers as information demands have expanded," said Dave Reinsel, program director of Storage Research at IDC. "As data manageability continues to become an increasingly larger task, IDC anticipates further adoption of solutions, such as nearline storage, specifically targeted to help ease various levels of data management."

NL35 SATA Details
With 250 GB and 400 GB capacities, the NL35 SATA drive delivers increased storage capacity density and lowers the cost-per-gigabyte for nearline and secondary storage applications. A rating of 1.0 million hours MTBF ensures that enterprise reliability isn't compromised while a SATA II 1.0 interface means integration is easy within an existing Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) environment.

The NL35 SATA also includes other advanced features such as 16 MB cache, Native Command Queuing (NCQ), and Error Recovery. The benefit to IT Professionals is that the NL35 SATA is ready to operate in nearline workloads while ensuring performance remains rock solid.

Seagate Enterprise Leadership
Seagate continues to be the leader in the Enterprise space, and its range of products are focused on delivering the features and benefits that matter most to Seagate's customers. This includes delivering solutions focused on providing the world's highest reliability, with industry-leading areal densities, the fastest performance, and a range of form-factor sizes and interface choices to satisfy every possible enterprise requirement. No other company is as well-equipped to provide the robust level of enterprise storage choices as Seagate.

"As a customer-focused company, Seagate continues to work closely with its OEM and channel customers to better understand and respond to their requirements," said Jeff Loebbaka, Seagate vice president of Global Marketing. "The result is a range of storage solutions from Seagate that addresses virtually every segment within the enterprise, consumer, and personal storage categories today."

The first of Seagate's NL35 family is expected to ship during Calendar Q1 of 2005. For more information about the Seagate NL35 family as well as other enterprise storage solutions, please visit specials.seagate.com/enterprise.