It turns out that the Alpine 9600 disk array storage subsystem launched last week by Storage Technology Corp’s XL/Datacomp Inc (CI No 1,908) has nothing to do with StorageTek’s Iceberg disk array, but comes from Boulder, Colorado neighbour Array Technology Corp, owned by Tandem Computers Inc. A surprise except that StorageTek announced in August 1990 that it would buy the systems OEM from Array, and the latter was to develop the software and hardware around the disk drives to create a RAID device (CI No 1,480) an indication that StorageTek was eyeing the AS/400 market long before acquiring Rosemount, Illinois-based XL/Datacomp in August. Alipine was planned for launch in 1991, but has slipped, and will now ship in the third quarter this year. It uses two R3000 RISC processors from MIPS Computer Systems Inc, while Iceberg uses Advanced Micro Devices Inc’s Am29000 RISC. Hewlett-Packard Co 5.25 disk drives provide capacities from 10Gb to 25Gb for Alpine, and the various components are customer replaceable. The RAID level 5 device has logical data mapping which allows data to be spread over multiple disk drives, and if one disk in a parity group fails, Alpine reconstructs the data by using actual and parity data stored on the other disks. It is 9336-compatible and AS/400 applications can migrate without conversion.
