Havant, Hampshire-based Xyratex Ltd has launched a series of disk storage subsystems aimed at high end personal computer users, opened an office in San Jose, California to aid its international ambitions, and filled in details of its work for Nomai SA. The disk subsystems series, called the 9000, includes the orphaned company’s first line of RAID disk arrays and one with IBM Corp’s Serial Storage Architecture interface. For the company formed by a management buyout of the IBM UK Ltd Havant plant last December (CI No 2,566), these products represent its independent work and are crucially important to the company’s efforts in establishing itself as a supplier of storage products. In February, it launched a removable hard disk drive and optical disk drive (CI No 2,611) but these products, and the RAID especially, extend Xyratex’s relatively new storage business, and it is planning more and more storage products aimed at the high-end, single user, small local area network market, an area the company says manufacturers have not addressed so far. Xyratex also makes and develops testers and flexible circuit boards, and has just embarked on software development for service information and diagnostics. It also provides contract maufacturing for customers like IBM itself and Nomai and says it is in such a healthy position at the moment that it’s about to take on more staff. With the new products, Xyratex says it has merged latest technology with design considerations that make its products easy to use. For example, the R9000 RAID product, is modular and Xyratex says all components, including power supplies and cooling fans, are hot swappable and accessible from the front of the machine. The R9000 supports RAID levels 0, 1, 3, 5, and has capacities ranging from 4Gb to 56Gb, with disks held in a tower of seven drives.
General unpopularity
It has a Fast/Wide Small Computer Systems Interface, type II, with a claimed throughput of 20M-bytes per second. It is compatible with most Unix system, MS-DOS, OS/2 and NetWare. Level 3 capacity was developed, despite its general unpopularity, because Xyratex believes it is a good storage medium for video-on-demand applications, and the company says the introduction of second generation controllers has improved performance. Additionally, Xyratex is bundling software with the system that will configure and manage drives, and improve controller function. The R9000 will be marketed as a niche product, aimed at single users of very high end systems, or to provide storage for a small local area network, and will ship next quarter although there are no prices yet. The S9000 makes use of Serial Storage Architecture interface, a technology Xyratex is very familiar with as it was developed by its engineers when part of IBM. And the company reckons that in lower level systems, like S9000, Serial Storage Architecture is cheaper and easier to install than the rival Fibre Channel: Xyratex says Fibre Channel only shows benefit in systems with more than 40 drives. For Avranches, France-based Nomai, Xyratex will be building a removable hard disk drive for a consortium, including IBM, Maxell Corp and Iomega Corp, that is attempting to establish a new standard in hard disk drives. Nomai, the drive’s designer, reckons the the increasing use of multimedia applications is driving the demand for cheap removable hard disks. Marc Frouin, Nomai’s chief executive, admitted that the idea was a niche product but said It’s a fast growing niche, growing by 100% a year. The hard drive has access times of 10mS and 4.5M-bytes to 5M-bytes per second transfer rates, measures 1 by 4 by 5.9 and weighs 15 oz. The cartridges that it will use are made of liquid crystal plastic, said to be 10 times more durable than the polycarbonate used in CDs, and Nomai reckons that there will be no problem getting a number of vendors interested in making them. Recording is via magneto-resistive heads and the cartridge measures 3.8 by 3.9 by 0.39 thick, and weighs 3 oz. Nomai has been in the business of annoying Syquest Tec
hnology Inc by making media and magneto-optical disks for some time but says the latter is just not able to give the bandwidth users need for things like digitised video. The drive should ship this summer and the planned pricing structure is that a drive with two 680Mb cartridges will cost the same as a fixed Winchester. Xyratex is still not revealing the value of the buyout but says the seven senior managers put up a considerable chunk of money, equity finance came from Murray Johnstone Ltd and Midland Bank Plc made loans; all employees have a stake in Xyratex and the company is ready to recruit more at Havant.
