Storage Technology Corp is to announce its entry into the AS/400 storage tape drive business on Monday, in a challenge to one of IBM Corp’s few remaining captive markets. StorageTek’s newer generation 9840 drives supporting the AS/400 are now generally available, the company said this week. The drives already support MVS, most flavors of Unix and Windows NT. With half a million users and still growing, the AS/400 was the next obvious platform for StorageTek to target. Many of its existing customers are already AS/400 users.
Currently, the top 20% of high-end AS/400 users – StorageTek’s prime targets – are using IBM Magstar drives. StorageTek’s 9840s are 20% faster for backups than Magstar, the company claims, and likely to remain so due to the mechanics of Magstar. They also support 20Gb cartridges rather than IBM’s 10Gb, although IBM is now ready with 20Gb itself and promises 40Gb by year-end (CI No 3,640). Overall throughput is 30% up on comparable IBM 3590 offerings, says StorageTek, and thousands of dollars less expensive. Even so, StorageTek says it’s watched IBM’s own list prices on the 3590B drop from $50,000 to $30,000 over the last few months, in preparation for its first competition in the market. The list price of the 9840 drive is $27,400.
The drives present themselves to users as an IBM 3490 drive, or as a 3590 by using an adapter from Anaheim, California-based American International Business Tech Inc. StorageTek says it’s working on native support for 3590, but says the AI adapter adds dual copy and channel extension capabilities. AI is the new owner of tape storage vendor Transitional Technology Inc, which it agreed to acquire last year.
Testing was carried out at a very large southern hemisphere telco where performance tests in comparison with IBM systems were run. Office Depot Inc, which has around 780 stores in the US and Canada, is another early customer. StorageTek has increased its AS/400 support staff by around half over the last six months. It says it will initially concentrate on the backup market for the AS/400, following IBM’s own model, but says that later it may begin suggesting more innovative uses for tape storage on AS/400s. Sales will be direct initially, but an unnamed AS/400 distributor has been signed up for later in the year, the company said.
Also on Monday, StorageTek is due to announce an expansion of its Virtual Storage Manager software to support the 9840 drives and extended Timberline EE tape drives. Until now, the underlying drives supported by VSM were either standard Timberline drives or Redwood helical scan drives. Between 60% and 70% of StorageTek customers have a mixture of drives. The company said it had no plans to add support for IBM Magstar drives as one of the real drives hiding behind VSM, which presents itself as a 3490E to users.
VSM now also supports dynamic ESCON directors, so that multiple NearLine tape drives can be shared across multiple disk buffers, an advantage for large VSM installations where greater tape resource efficiency and workload balancing are needed.
StorageTek says it is watching the progress of the Linear Tape Open Group, the consortium including IBM, Hewlett-Packard Co and Seagate Technology Inc, and says it will consider the adoption of the Ultrium cartridge at the lower end of its tape library ranges, but doesn’t see much of a future for the high-end, fast access Accelis format.
