Amdahl Corp did rather well marketing its Fujitsu Ltd-built disk drives during the 3380 cycle, but the company had to tell analysts earlier this month that the 3390-compatible drives it had hoped to ship this quarter will be four to six weeks late. The company blamed unspecified problems thrown up in testing for the delay in 6390 shipments, but said that the problem was at its own end and not at Fujitsu. In common with IBM Corp itself, Amdahl had a pretty rotten second quarter, and needs the new disks because sales of its 6380s are dwindling. There’s good news and bad news in the fact that while Hitachi Data Systems Inc has been shipping its own answer to the 3390 since early this year, it still has the drives on allocation because of greater than expected demand: good news that Amdahl could be doing fairly good business once it can start shipping the drives, and bad that it is missing out on a current opportunity.
