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To: Jock Hutchinson who wrote (18322)	4/27/1999 2:14:00 PM
From: Paul Lee	Respond to of 25814

LSI Logic Storage Systems Chosen by Amdahl for New Fibre Channel Open Storage Offering Scalable, Fourth Generation OEM Storage Technology Enables Robust SAN Solution for Amdahl Customers WICHITA, Kan., April 27 /PRNewswire/ -- LSI Logic Storage Systems, Inc., a leading supplier of scalable storage solutions for the enterprise, today announced that Amdahl Corporation has selected LSI Logic's latest generation of fibre channel based scalable disk array technology for incorporation into Amdahl's new LVS(TM) 4800 Open Storage System also announced today. "Amdahl's partnership with LSI Logic continues to grow with the introduction of the LVS 4800 fibre channel storage system," said David West, vice president, Systems Marketing at Amdahl Corporation. "We chose LSI Logic because of their leadership and years of experience in providing scalable, multi-platform, high performance storage solutions that allow customers to easily migrate to new generations of SAN-capable fibre channel products. We feel that these strengths couple well with Amdahl's technologies and unmatched service offerings." As organizations move to adopt emerging fibre channel technology, they are finding it a challenge to quickly and easily integrate products from a variety of suppliers. Amdahl and LSI Logic have teamed to overcome this challenge by conducting rigorous testing of third party components for interoperability with LSI Logic proven fibre channel disk arrays, enabling the two companies to deliver fully integrated and certified storage solutions. "We are pleased that Amdahl selected LSI Logic Storage Systems as the provider of storage technology for their latest generation of LVS storage systems," said Mitch Seigle, director of OEM Sales and Marketing, LSI Logic Storage Systems, Inc. "Over the past three years LSI Logic and Amdahl have strategically partnered to develop and deliver leading-edge, highly interoperable storage solutions. Today's announcement represents a significant step forward in this partnership."

To: Jock Hutchinson who wrote (18322)	4/27/1999 6:25:00 PM
From: Tony Viola	Respond to of 25814

Jock, The LVS 4800 is an enterprise storage system that could most quickly be described as very similar to a top of the line EMC storage system. These are RAID (redundant array of inexpensive disks) storage systems that are made up of racks, or bays of up to ten individual hard drives each, where the drives can each store up to 36 gigabytes. So, a system with two bays with 10 drives each would represent 720 gigabytes of storage, all in a frij size box. The rest of the box has microprocessor controllers, microcode, or firmware, power supplies, and fans. The 4800 can be connected to CPUs running OS/390 (AKA mainframes), or UNIX, or NT, or any combination of these. This is called an open, or cross platform system. One or more of these (typically many), along with a tape drive or two would comprise the I/O "farm" for a data center containing one or more large, powerful CPUs. Another key feature of the storage systems is that they are designed for ultra high reliability and, e.g., have a feature called no single point of failure (NSPF). This is achieved via hot pluggable and redundant hard drives, power supplies and fans. I believe you can pull out any one of the above in the system and it keeps running with no loss of data. The 4800 is different from its predecessor, the 4600, in that the drives run at 10,000 rpm instead of 7,200. This, of course, results in faster access time. The drive bays, obviously, come from LSI Logic Storage Systems, or what I will probably always call Symbios. Again, Jock, as you and I (and others) have said, Symbios looks to have been an outstanding purchase by LSI Logic. The age of storage is here. That's not to say that storage hasn't always been required, of course it has. But today it's growing faster than CPUs are, and data centers are getting to be more "storage-centric", hey, did I just coin one? Probably NOT. Getting down to business for LSI/Symbios, I know that Amdahl uses Symbios drive bays. I wonder who else does? EMC has been a big Seagate customer but has signed a big customer - vendor agreement with IBM recently. I imagine they'll be swinging more business IBM's way. So, it sounds like EMC builds their own drive bays, otherwise, why have big contracts for individual hard drives with Seagate and IBM? IBM, for their storage systems, can feed themselves, the ultimate vertically integrated company. I'm going to read my LSI annual report I got last weekend to see if it has any big customer hints in it. Oh, of course, SI itself must have a herd, or farm of these storage systems, for all the archiving they do (excellent). Either Amdahl's or EMC's would be fine. Tony