St. Paul, Minn. (February 14, 1995) - 3M and Rexon Inc., Solon, Ohio, have announced that Rexon will manufacture and market minicartridge tape drives based on 3M's new Travan™ technology.

The Travan platform will enable manufacturers to develop new drive and minicartridge products that will more than double existing minicartridge capacity. To date, six leading companies - 3M, Sony, Hewlett-Packard's Colorado Memory Systems Division, Conner Peripherals, Iomega, Inc., and Rexon - have announced plans to manufacture products based on Travan technology.

The Travan platform features a unique drive/minicartridge interface that is included in a patent application filed by 3M.

According to Rich Peters, executive vice president, sales and marketing, Rexon, Inc., Travan technology presents the industry with a wide range of exciting new opportunities.

"We view 3M's Travan technology as the catalyst to bring forward a new generation of cost-effective, high-performance tape drives to address user requirements for the backup of desktop computers, multi-user systems and LANs," Peters said. "Rexon is developing a family of Travan tape drives with a number of models to meet the complete range of our customer needs from low-end PC backup to high-performance tape solutions."

"The market will start to see Travan products from Rexon in mid-1995, with a number of key product announcements throughout the year," added Peters. "Travan is a key strategic initiative for us, and we look forward to working with 3M and others to move Travan technology to its full potential."

"Rexon's decision to develop drives based on Travan technology is good news for users from both a product performance and drive supply standpoint," said Michael J. Stevens, business development director, 3M Data Storage Tape Technology Division. "Users will benefit from the availability of a wider range of compatible, high-capacity, high-performance new tape products supported by the leading minicartridge drive manufacturers."

Product Development On Track
The companies developing drives based on the Travan platform are working with the Quarter-Inch Cartridge (QIC) organization to develop a migration path that incorporates the Travan cartridge and the resulting drive recording formats. The initial points along the migration path will include a modified version of QIC-80, 3010 and 3020 recording formats that accept the new cartridge.

The native (uncompressed) storage capacity of the new Travan modified QIC-80 drive/cartridge is expected to be 400 MB (current minicartridge capacity is 125 MB). Native storage capacity of the new modified 3010 drive/cartridge is expected to be 800 MB (now 340 MB), while the capacity of the new modified 3020 drive/cartridge is expected to be 1.6 GB (now 670 MB).

The Travan platform will optimize available space in a 3.5-inch drive form factor housing. Mechanical changes will enable the drive to accept current QIC minicartridges, QIC-Wide and Travan cartridges. The new cartridge will contain 750 feet of .315-inch media. The initial Travan cartridge offerings will require no changes in media formulation, and will use existing drive electronics and available head technology.

"The inherent benefits to users of Travan technology - substantially higher capacity while maintaining backward compatibility with existing media - cannot be disputed," said Fara Yale, Principal Analyst, Dataquest Computer Storage Service, San Jose, Calif. "This new minicartridge technology offers excellent potential for this segment of the tape industry, a win for end users. Travan technology represents a long-term view of the market that will make QIC minicartridge products even more competitive in the future."

According to 3M's Stevens, the Travan platform will allow minicartridges to keep pace with rapidly increasing hard-disk capacities, while enabling the industry to better support emerging software applications like Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) on the desktop and Windows95.

Travan technology will also satisfy the critical need for users to capitalize on their investments in QIC technology through backward-read compatibility, Stevens adds.

3M, Rexon, HP/Colorado Memory Systems, Conner Peripherals, Iomega, and Sony plan to continue working on future development of the Travan drive and recording formats to assure further expansion of the market for tape-based applications. Each capacity point on the Travan technology migration path will represent at least a two-fold capacity increase with all previous capacity points. Backward compatibility will also be assured at each convergence point, adds 3M's Stevens.

Rexon, Inc. (NASDAQ/REXN) is a publicly owned company dedicated to software, storage and solutions for the computer industry. It offers Wangtek quarter-inch cartridge (QIC) and WangDAT Digital Audio Tape (DAT) tape drive product lines.

The Tecmar brand solutions from Rexon include QICVault, DATaVault, ProLine and ProLine CX. Sytron brand software products include Sytos Plus, ProServe CX, and Tape Ware. Multimedia products for desktop and server applications are marketed under the name Tecmar brand to OEMs and distribution accounts. Headquarters are located in Solon, Ohio.

Data cartridge technology, invented and patented by 3M, is the world's most popular desktop tape backup technology and boasts an installed base of more than 11 million drives, with three million drives shipped in 1994 alone.

3M is the world's largest manufacturer and marketer of branded minicartridges.

Travan is a trademark of 3M.
QIC-Wide is a trademark of Sony.
Windows is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation.

Copyright 1996 Imation. All rights reserved.