Storage Technology Corp is to resume direct sales of its Shared Virtual Array mainframe disk family today, after nearly three years of designing and building them solely for IBM Corp. At Berlin’s EuroStage 99 show, StorageTek will today (Monday) introduce its 9393 SVA disk storage drives, supporting Unix for the first time as well as System 390 mainframes.
First introduced in 1994, StorageTek’s Iceberg, Kodiak and Arctic Fox disk drive ranges disappeared in 1996 after it agreed to hand over all marketing to IBM. In return, IBM scrapped its own products and renamed the Storagetek boxes as its own Ramac Virtual Array Storage systems. StorageTek continued with all the design and manufacturing (CI No 2,931). At the time, the deal attracted the attention of the Department of Justice, who eventually cleared it a year and a half later after minimal changes to the terms. By July 1998, IBM had sold 5,000 systems, and had extended the deal until 2000. It now has a 30% share of the S/390 direct attached market with the systems.
Now, however, the two companies appear to be moving apart. Although the OEM deal remains in place, Storagetek says it has a different approach to the Unix space and was prompted by customer requests for co-located storage systems. Customers, it says, are looking to consolidate their distributed Unix-based servers back into enterprise data centers alongside OS/390 mainframes, to reduce costs, increase security, and gain access to data for new applications such as data mining. StorageTek quotes figures from International Data Corp which project the size of the co-located storage market will be $8bn by 2001. EMC Corp is aiming at exactly the same space.
IBM, meanwhile, isn’t expected to take the Unix attachment enhancements, although StorageTek will provide it with some of the other enhancements it is introducing, which will emerge in a product soon to be announced by IBM itself. These include a 50% increase in performance, the company claims. At the same time, IBM is working at the Unix problem from the other way around. Later this year it plans to extend its Tarpon open storage system with the so-called Shark mainframe connectivity option (CI No 3,367). After that, it remains to be seen whether StorageTek’s current OEM agreement is extended beyond the current term.
StorageTek says it’s also working on a software product for the second half of this year that will enable management of both OS/390 and Unix storage systems from a single interface. The product will also extend StorageTek’s SnapShot replication software to Unix-based systems. StorageTek has also signed up with Amdahl Corp as a reseller of Amdahl’s TDMF transparent data migration facility, and has co-developed the HSDM high speed data mover product with Little Falls, New Jersey-based Innovation Data Processing Inc for speeding up backup processes. Further partnerships and alliances are planned, it says.
SVA systems from StorageTek are available immediately for OS/390, with connections to Unix servers in the second quarter of this year. The single management point software will initially support Sun Solaris with HP-UX and AIX to follow.
