CRAY RESEARCH ENTERS HIGH-PERFORMANCE RAID
MARKET

Company Introduces New Disk Arrays,
Reduces Price on Newest Disk Drives

EAGAN, Minn., March 18, 1993 -- Cray Research today
announced its newest disk array technology based on the
company's DA-60 and DA-62 disk arrays and its new DCA-3
channel adapter.  This technology provides RAID (Redundant
Array of Inexpensive Disks) level 3 reliability features and
a four-fold increase in data transfer.  This is the first RAID
level 3-based storage product from Cray Research,
signaling the importance of this technology for high-
performance computing, the company said.

Today the company also announced a price reduction on the
DD-60 and DD-62 disk drives, the components that make up
the DA-60 and DA-62 arrays.  The DD-60's pricing is now
reduced by 20 percent; the DD-62's pricing is reduced by 28
percent.  Cray Research formally announced these disk
drives in 1991 and 1992.

The DA-60 array is capable of sustained sequential I/O
transfer rate of 80 million bytes (Mbytes) per second and a
storage capacity scalable from 7.84 billion bytes (Gbytes)
to 62.72 Gbytes.  The DA-62 array has a sustained
sequential I/O transfer rate of 32 Mbytes per second and a
capacity scalable from 10.92 Gbytes to 87.36 Gbytes.

The DCA-3 channel adapter is based on Cray Research's
latest CRAY Y-MP C90 integrated circuit technology, the
company said.  The new hardware product provides a high
I/O performance, direct disk channel connection between
the I/O (input/output) subsystem of Cray Research
supercomputers and the DA-60 and DA-62 disk arrays.  This
new technology provides improved disk storage reliability,
enhanced data integrity, and high I/O performance, allowing
users to maximize the overall capability of their
supercomputing resources.  The disk arrays can be used
with all CRAY Y-MP model E supercomputers and the more
recent CRAY Y-MP C90 system, the company said.

"We find that many frontier-breaking computational
problems today are limited more by disk I/O performance
than CPU or memory performance," said Mike Anderson,
peripherals product manager at Cray Research.  "These new
RAID products will provide Cray Research customers with
state-of-the-art reliability, capacity, and performance
required to solve these frontier problems."

The DCA-3 channel adapter supports four data drives and a
dedicated drive for storing parity information, which is
used in data reconstruction in the event of a drive failure or
uncorrectable media error.  Cray Research's new disk array
hardware and software (included in the most recent release
of Cray Research's UNICOS operating system) provides one
of the industry's fastest data reconstruction environments,
the company said.   If a drive fails, for example, the array
hardware continues to operate while the failed drive is
replaced.   The data reconstruction software rebuilds the
data on the replacement drive while the array is still
operating and provides several orders of magnitude faster
reconstruction than the company's previous disk array
technology.

In addition to increased disk storage reliability, enhanced
data integrity, and high I/O performance provided by this
new Cray Research technology, the DA-60 and DA-62 disk
arrays provide superior small I/O transfer performance,
Anderson said.   This is a critical I/O element in achieving
true high-performance supercomputing, he said.   Also,
because two channel adapters can be connected to the each
of the supercomputer's I/O processors, the DCA-3 channel
adapter doubles the maximum disk storage capacity of Cray
Research systems.

The channel adapter has a list price (U.S.) of $50,000.  DA-
60 pricing begins at $190,000 and DA-62 pricing begins at
$120,000.

Cray Research creates the most powerful, highest-quality
computational tools for solving the world's most
challenging scientific and industrial problems.

Mardi Schmieder, 612/683-3538