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Plasmon Plc today announced it has entered into a non-exclusive agreement with Exabyte Corporation to purchase design and manufacturing licenses for a range of Exabyte-designed tape autoloaders. Plasmon will establish manufacturing capabilities for the products at its Colorado Springs facility and expects to begin production by the end of 2001.

Plasmon has had an OEM supply agreement with Exabyte since October, 2000 and currently markets the 10 and 21 cartridge autoloaders with LTO tape technology. The new licensing agreements will also enable Plasmon to manufacture versions of the products employing Sony AIT and Quantum Super DLTtape technologies.

Autoloaders are compact and affordable, and present an ideal first step into automated data storage applications including unattended network backup, remote storage, automated archiving, imaging and hierarchical storage management. Plasmon autoloaders are certified by all the major backup software vendors and provide up to 2.1 terabytes of native capacity in both rack-mount and standalone versions. Prices start as low as $10,000.

Plasmon already designs and manufactures tape libraries for LTO technology with native storage capacities ranging from 3 to 50 terabytes. ``The new Exabyte AIT-2 and Super DLTtape autoloaders are important additions to our business. Our customers now have more choices to match their application and budget requirements,'' announced Robert Clark, Plasmon's senior vice president of U.S. sales and marketing.

``Plasmon is a world leader in 5.25-inch MO, DVD, and 12-inch optical libraries and now offers a full range of tape autoloaders and automated tape libraries that leverage over a decade of automated optical library manufacturing experience,'' said Nigel Street, chief executive, Plasmon Plc. ``The Exabyte license acquisition will enable us to update the autoloader's specifications and features in line with our own products to create a class-leading range of tape libraries.''