Hoping to trade its way out of recession and its own difficult financial condition with a string of new products, Memorex Telex International NV has launched the 3500 Optical Storage Subsystem for IBM Corp mainframes, which gets round compatibility problems by attaching to any data streaming channel and emulating the IBM 3480 tape drive. Designed as a replacement for microfiche and other on-line archival storage applications, the 3500 includes robotic platter handling to cram up to 340Gb into 15.8 square feet. It is offered with two, three or four drives, and a single controller can handle up to four of the robotic libraries. For microfiche replacement, Axcis indexing software for MVS and Cords indexing for VM are available immediately. It is out now and it costs $475,000 with two drives and the Axcis software.
